Randall Robinson  (b. 1941) LINKS The Debt: What America Owes Blacks http://www.thedebt.net/manifesto.shtml Randall Robinson’s newest book, The Debt, continues Robinson’s pledge to gain reparations for black Americans who are the descendants of slaves. Robinson’s manifesto is also available here. Randall Robinson http://www.c-span.org/guide/books/booknotes/archive/bn0315.htm Booknotes at C-Span has an interview with Randall Robinson concerning his book Defending the Spirit: A Black Life in America. The Web site makes the interview available in audio, video, and text formats. In addition, it provides biographical information about Robinson and advance praise for the book. The TransAfrica Forum: The Case for Black Reparations http://www.transafricaforum.org/reports/print/reparations_print.shtml “The enslavement of blacks in America lasted 246 years. It was followed by a century of legal racial segregation and discrimination. The two periods, taken together, constitute the longest running crime against humanity in the world over the last 500 years,” Robinson claims in the Transcript from the Proceedings for The Case for Black Reparations. Additional information on the other forum members is available here. Randall Robinson’s Love Affair with Castro http://www.cubanet.org/CNews/y01/jun01/14e9.htm FrontPageMagazine.com presents Randall Robinson’s views on Fidel Castro. BIOGRAPHY Robinson was born in Richmond, Virginia, and educated in its segregated schools. “They never let you forget that Richmond was the capital of the Confederacy,” he told an interviewer. “I remember going with my mother to a department store, and she’d have to put on a little cap before they let her try on ladies’ hats. I recall sitting at the back of the bus with lots of empty seats up front. I remember delivering groceries to a white home, and when I came into the kitchen and they were discussing something very personal, they never stopped talking. It was as if I wasn’t there. I was invisible.” He dropped out of college after three years, served in the army, returned to Richmond, and earned his B.A. at Virginia Union University (1967). He attended Harvard Law School, where for the first time he sat in integrated classrooms. After graduating in 1970 and going to Tanzania on a Ford Fellowship, Robinson returned to the United States to become an attorney for the Boston Legal Defense Fund, a job from which he was fired for insisting that an office serving the African American community should have an African American as its director. He went on to serve as an aide to two Congressmen. In 1977, Robinson was named executive director of TransAfrica, an organization that grew out of meetings of the Congressional Black Caucus. In that position, he now lobbies on U.S. foreign policy issues affecting Africa and the Caribbean. Robinson has also taken his political beliefs to the street. He was arrested in 1984 for taking part in a highly publicized antiapartheid sit-in at the South African Embassy in Washington, D.C. In 1994, he went on a hunger strike to protest the treatment of Haitian refugees—a strike that ended twenty-seven days later when the U.S. government changed its policy. Robinson’s recent works include the autobiography, Defending the Spirit: A Black Life in America (1998), and The Debt (2000), a book-length polemic arguing for reparations by the U.S. government to its African American citizens.