Randall Robinson, proper, is pictured with Coretta Scott King and Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., after the Senate voted to override then-President Reagan’s veto of powerful new sanctions in opposition to South Africa in 1986. Robinson died Friday at 81.

John Duricka/AP

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John Duricka/AP

Randall Robinson, proper, is pictured with Coretta Scott King and Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., after the Senate voted to override then-President Reagan’s veto of powerful new sanctions in opposition to South Africa in 1986. Robinson died Friday at 81.

John Duricka/AP

Randall Robinson, a human rights activist and lawyer identified for his advocacy in opposition to South African apartheid and for Haitian democracy, died Friday at age 81. He died in St. Kitts, the Caribbean island the place he spent the final 20 years of his life, of aspiration pneumonia.

“He was an unbelievable father,” mentioned Khalea Ross Robinson, his daughter, who confirmed his demise to NPR on Sunday. “He did lots on behalf of individuals he hadn’t even met.”

Robinson was one of many leaders of the Free South Africa Motion, which started within the Nineteen Eighties and pushed to finish apartheid. He “led a variety of overseas coverage campaigns in his life-long advocacy in protection of democracy and justice in Africa and the Caribbean,” a press launch from Robinson’s household says.

Robinson based the Washington, D.C.-based overseas coverage advocacy group TransAfrica in 1977 to advertise “range and fairness within the overseas coverage enviornment and justice for the African World” together with the African diaspora, in accordance with the group’s mission assertion. He served because the president of the group till 2001.

Throughout his time at TransAfrica, he organized a sit-in on the South African embassy to foyer in opposition to apartheid and went on a 27-day starvation strike to stress the U.S. authorities to reinstate the democratically elected authorities of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, amongst many different actions. He was additionally a number one voice advocating for reparations for Black People.

He was born in Richmond, Va., in 1941, and attributed his activism later in life to his experiences of segregation.

“The insult of segregation was searing and unforgettable,” he mentioned in a 2005 interview with The Progressive Journal. He mentioned becoming a member of the social justice motion was “salvaging. All of us should die, and I most well-liked to have only one demise. It appears to me that to undergo insult with out response is to die many deaths.”

Earlier than founding TransAfrica and changing into identified for his political activism, he earned a J.D. at Harvard Regulation Faculty and labored as a civil rights lawyer in Boston. He served as a professor of human rights regulation at Penn State College and wrote a number of books.

In 2001, Robinson left america to settle in St. Kitts within the Caribbean, together with his spouse, Hazel Ross-Robinson. In considered one of his books, he explains that he left the U.S. for a spot that he thought-about extra peaceable and hospitable to Black folks.

“I by no means believed my place was essentially bodily in America,” he informed NPR in 2004. “I’m as a lot a Nigerian, a Haitian, a South African, a Kittitian, a Jamaican as I’m an American. There should not be these partitions between the folks of the Black world. I’ve lived that and I’ve dedicated myself to that in all the things that I’ve achieved all through my life.”

A funeral service might be held in St. Kitts in April, and a memorial service might be held in Washington, D.C., in Could, in accordance with the household.