His estranged father was journalist Jerome Ewart Rampersad (born Geronimo Ewart Hernandez), who was assumed to have written the famed In the Courts Today column under the pseudonym "McGee" and was a contemporary and colleague of Seepersad Naipaul, father of Nobel Prize winner V. S. Naipaul.
His father was born to Christopher Rampersad, a Presbyterian Indian, and Romana Hernandez, a Roman Catholic of Venezuelan Mulatto descent.
[4] In 1973, he earned a Ph.D from Harvard University, his dissertation being subsequently published as the intellectual biography The Art and Imagination of W. E. B.
Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Arthur Ashe, Jackie Robinson, Ralph Ellison, as well as edited volumes of writings by Richard Wright.
[9] Rampersad is the half-brother of Roger Toussaint, the president of Transport Workers Union Local 100.