A Day with Africa
Randall Robinson
Keynote Speaker
Randall Robinson is one of the most visible spokesmen for continuing American support of Africa. As the executive director of TransAfrica Forum, a Washington, D.C. lobbying group for Africa and the Caribbean, Robinson was a vocal critic of apartheid South Africa and challenged the Clinton administration's treatment of Haitian refugees--at one point going on a 27-day hunger strike to protest their deportation. Robinson notes, "During the Cold War, United States foreign policy hurt Africa and the Caribbean more than it helped it. We must set an entirely new course of action in the post-war era." Randall Robinson is also the author of several articles and a critically acclaimed recent collection of autobiographical essays, Defending the Spirit: A Black Life in America. He has been honored with the Martin Luther King Jr. Distinguished Service and Humanitarian Awards, the Congressional Black
Caucus Humanitarian Award, the Johnson Publishing Company American Black Achievement Award, and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference Drum Major for Justice Award. Robinson has also received an honorary doctorate from Chicago's Columbia College in 1986 and has been cited as a "Person of the Week" by ABC Television. Robinson, who has served as Nelson Mandela's spokesman in the United States, is a graduate of Harvard Law School. After working in Tanzania as a Ford Foundation fellow, he was a public interest lawyer in Boston for several years. In 1975, he moved to Washington, D.C., where he first worked as an aide to Missouri Rep. William Clay, and later for Michigan Rep. Charles Diggs.
"We're responsible for each other," says Robinson. "Leadership has to do with honestly accepting responsibility to improve our society," while going "above the trendy, above the popular, above immediate gratification." Robinson "views leadership as the 'relentless pursuit' of what one believes in."
TransAfrica Forum is "an African-American foreign policy institution . . . founded in 1981 to provide a forum for the collection, analysis and dissemination of information about Africa and the Caribbean and about the United States' policies affecting these regions." The Forum is dedicated to promoting such issues as human rights, democracy, and sustained economic development. The centerpiece of its Washington facility is the Arthur R. Ashe, Jr. Foreign Policy Library, the only library in the United States focused on foreign policy toward and education regarding the countries of Africa and the Caribbean. TransAfrica Forum seeks to enlighten not only the attitudes of the foreign policy establishment, but those of the African-American community as well, in 1989 initiating the Education for Careers in International Affairs program, in conjunction with three historically black colleges and universities: Spelman College, Lincoln University, and Xavier University. The program is designed to increase the number of African Americans preparing for and obtaining employment in international careers in general, and the U.S. Foreign Service in particular.
About Defending the Spirit: A Black Life in America critics write:
"Robinson's brutally frank look at race relations in the U.S. and how it impacts foreign policy toward Africa and the Caribbean offers background and analysis vital to understanding why some 'obscure' African nation suddenly explodes into headlines and television footage. At the level of personal, intimate history, Robinson recounts childhood memories of growing up in the segregated South, experiences with racism at two major American institutions (the military and Harvard), a painful divorce, and the AIDS-related death of his brother, Max Robinson, the first black television anchor. When Robinson decided that he was better suited to crusading for human rights than practicing law, he founded the first organization to lobby for African and Caribbean interests, TransAfrica. The rest is his history. According to Robinson, TransAfrica was the catalyst behind ending apartheid in South Africa and restoring democracy in Haiti. Robinson brings his own considerable journalistic talent to riveting accounts of the behind-the-scenes developments that led to ending apartheid in South Africa . . . He openly skewers prominent figures, black and white, [Nelson] Mandela included, revealing shortfalls where they have shrunk from standing behind the most basic of human rights for the sake of maintaining the status quo." --Vanessa Bush, Booklist"If you think race relations have really improved over the last 20 years, then you need to read Randall Robinson's Defending the Spirit. From the opening pages of this series of mainly autobiographical essays, Robinson gives no quarter in his role as myth-buster. This book is not for the faint of heart. It contains enough food for thought to satisfy an intellectual glutton."-- Anthony Davis, The Philadelphia Inquirer
