He is a tall man from a special Virginia family, and the mark he has made on his world should not be overlooked this Black History Month by those whose eyes are fixed on heroes long since dead, their deeds long since exaggerated. Randall Robinson is very much alive, keen eyed, and very much a force to be reckoned with, and has a record that can be double-checked.

The quality that so distinguishes Robinson from the would-be urban leaders is that he does not consider himself foremost a leader. He is not a preacher but a scholar, a human-rights activist who, despite being a Harvard-trained lawyer, is wise and cannot be bought, one must think, for any price. One must also know that prices have been offered him, for he has operated at the highest levels of government, politics and commerce.

In his new book, "Quitting America: The Departure of a Black Man from His Native Land," Robinson describes himself as a "man of the people, race man, foundering activist, aging pan-Africanist." He is this and much more, though at the point of this self-description he was on a violent street in Rochester, N.Y., and he walked upon a group of menacing inner city "man-boys" he saw as "slavery's harvest."

Back in the tough days of U.S. cuddling with South Africa, it was Randall who educated a generation not so much about the obvious horrors of apartheid as about the not-so-obvious ways to defeat it. He organized TransAfrica, a pressure group that, in time, broke President Ronald Reagan's love grip with the Boers and helped bring the racist white minority government to its knees. In the mid-1980s, TransAfrica dynamited Reagan's policy of "constructive engagement" with the white racist government by pressuring Congress to enact crippling economic sanctions against the racist regime.

It was these economic sanctions that bankrupted apartheid, freed Nelson Mandela from his 27-year imprisonment, and ushered in democracy. He deserves as much a salute as anyone in the United States for making the modern South Africa a reality.

Robinson let others take the bows as he turned his artillery upon other global problems. When Maurice Bishop ran afoul of U.S. policy in Grenada, TransAfrica offered its good offices. Despite this, the young, promising prime minister would die in a homegrown, though U.S.-supported, coup d'etat.

Caribbean interest moved Robinson on to Haiti back during the 1990s. In pressuring the relatively friendly Clinton administration to come to the aid of Haiti, he went on a lengthy starvation fast that drew attention and got the nation's Haitian policy in gear.

After decades of affecting U.S. policy abroad, he turned to domestic policy. As the descendant of American slaves, he came nose-to-nose with his own country over two centuries of slavery denied and another century and a half of shamefaced, de facto racial segregation. In this, he wandered upon perhaps his greatest cause and challenge: reparations.

"Our country has been in a state of somewhat massive denial," he said in a discussion on reparations. "My wife urged me to come down to the Rotunda of the Capitol. I had been there. I worked there many years ago. And denial I think operates for the victims, as well. And I looked up and saw a painting on the eye of the Rotunda. It's called 'The Apotheosis of George Washington.' It represents to us all the ideals and objectives of American democracy. George Washington is surrounded by 60 robed figures, all of whom are white.

"On the rim of the dome is a frieze that depicts American history, from the dawn of exploration to the age of aviation. No Douglass. No Truth. No Tubman. No blacks period. The entire era of slavery is unreflected in the Capitol. Down at ground level, there are massive paintings, oil paintings set into huge stones. No blacks to be found anywhere. Upon examination, I discovered that the stones were cut in Stafford County, Virginia, brought up the river, put into place by slaves, that the statue Freedom that sits atop the dome of the Capitol was cast, disassembled, reassembled, and hoisted to the top of the Capitol by slaves. The forests between the Capitol and the White House were cleared by slaves. But not a tablet, not a monument, not a museum exists to commemorate the victims of the American Holocaust."

The case for reparation is in Robinson's book, "The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks." In his latest work, he describes how he has retreated from the rigors of struggle to live and work in St. Kitts. "I tried to love America but America would not love the ancient, full American whole of me," Robinson writes. "Thus I could not love America. I had come to know too too much of her work. I tried to love America, its credos, its ideals, its promise, its process. But these things could mean no more to me than they had to those who had conceived them, written them, recited them, and ultimately betrayed them."

Copyright © 2004, Newsday, Inc

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