His background led naturally to his being a spokesman for the abolition of slavery, and he trained as a doctor of medicine. However, he was also a spiritualist, and an advocate of the use of hashish to create trances; and after initiation by Eliphas Levi founded the Fraternitas Rosae Crucis, the oldest Rosicrucian organization in the United States, which today avoids mention of Randolph's assiduous interest in sex-magic.
In 1875 Randolph committed suicide, aged 49, and was succeeded as Supreme Grand Master of the Fraternitas, and in other titles, by his chosen successor Freeman B. Dowd.
In 1996 the biography Paschal Beverly Randolph: A Nineteenth-Century Black American Spiritualist, Rosicrucian, and Sex Magician by John Patrick Devaney and Franklin Rosemont was published (ISBN 0791431207).