Darrell Randall; ex-missionary was apartheid foe
WASHINGTON - Darrell Randall, a retired American University professor and former Methodist missionary who cofounded a conference center in South Africa that became a gathering spot for antiapartheid activists in the 1940s and '50s, died of pneumonia Aug. 10 at Sibley Memorial Hospital. He was 92.
A specialist on economic development in Asia and Africa, Mr. Randall joined American University in 1962 as the school's first tenured faculty member focusing on the problems of developing nations. He also started AU's first study-abroad program, said Louis Goodman, dean of the AU School of International Service.
"He was really a visionary kind of person," Goodman said. "He went to South Africa on a Methodist mission in the 1940s and had an appreciation of African nationalism that caused him to meet and engage with black South Africans at a time when the government was discouraging whites from meeting with nationalists."
Mr. Randall spent almost two decades in South Africa, cofounding the Wilgespruit Fellowship Center near Johannesburg in 1947, which held interracial conferences and was one of the first to nonviolently challenge apartheid.
Mr. Randall taught at the Jan Hofmeyr School of Social Work at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, where Eduardo Mondlane, the late leader of the Mozambique Liberation Front, was a student, and he socialized with Walter Sisulu, a top antiapartheid leader who was repeatedly imprisoned for his political activity. His work also brought him into contact with Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu, as well as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in the United States.
As a missionary and pacifist, Mr. Randall also traveled to North Africa, where he spent hours in discussions with Malcolm X and Libyan leader Moammar Khadafy. According to his brother, in the early 1960s, Mr. Randall consulted for President John F. Kennedy, and Senator Robert F. Kennedy before each traveled to Africa.
Nonprofit organizations, including Nonviolence International and several Christian groups, used his Washington home as temporary office space.
A native of Westlake, Neb., Darrell Donald Randall graduated from what is now Nebraska Wesleyan University in 1937 and received a master's degree in business administration from the University of Nebraska in 1939.
A conscientious objector in the civilian public service camp during World War II, he received a second master's degree, in international law and administration, from Columbia University in 1944, and a doctorate from the University of Chicago in international development in 1955.
After he returned from Africa, he worked at the United Nations as associate executive director of the Department of International Affairs for the National Council of Churches from 1958 to 1961. He then moved to Washington.
With a booming voice, strong handshake, and passionate advocacy for Third World development, "he was a one-man show," Goodman said. "He was so forceful in the way he did things that he didn't easily form alliances with others. But his ideas were so good that others took them and worked with them." 