Willard B. Ransom

Willard B. (Mike) Ransom was born in Indianapolis in 1916. He attended Crispus Attucks High School, newly opened as an African American high school in 1927. As an athlete at Attucks, he and his teammates were barred from competition against white schools by the Indiana High School Athletic Association.[1] Ransom graduated from Talladega College in Alabama in 1932 with summa cum laude honors and earned his Juris Doctorate from Harvard in 1939, as the only African American in his law school graduating class.[2]

Just a few years after earning his law degree, Willard Ransom was appointed Indiana’s assistant attorney general. Only two months into his four-year term, he was drafted into the US Army in 1941. Ransom was eventually deployed to Belgium and France, and worked in the Judge Advocate General’s (JAG) Office. During his service, Ransom, along with other African American service men, experienced “blatantly discriminatory and humiliating treatment.” He recalls, “We were fighting discrimination. Black officers couldn’t go into officers’ clubs, enlisted men couldn’t go into the noncommissioned officers’ clubs.”[3]

After the war, he returned to Indianapolis where he experienced prejudice and discrimination, as nearly all downtown restaurants, hotels, theaters, and other public places were segregated and closed to African Americans, which he considered an “overt slap in the face.”[4] During a 1991 interview, he said, “the contrast between having served in the Army and running into this discrimination and barriers at home was a discouraging thing.”[5] In order to fight the racial discrimination he and others experienced in Indiana in the 1940s, Ransom reorganized the state chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and served five terms as its chairman. He served as an Indiana delegate at the 1948 Progressive Party national convention, befitting his aggressive and relatively radical approach to leadership in the 1940s Civil Rights movement. Ransom organized local protests against businesses, before many of the marches and sit-ins that took place in the South.[6] He organized small sit-ins at a White Castle hamburger stand, drugstores, department stores, and restaurants.[7] He led over 50 protesters at a sit-in at the segregated bus station restaurant at the former Traction Terminal Building in downtown Indianapolis. Ransom recalls, “There was a big restaurant there, and there were so many blacks traveling on buses. We were insulted in that place because no one would serve us.”[8] His efforts to end segregation through protests and sit-ins lead to several arrests for Ransom.[9]

Ransom worked closely with NAACP’s chief lawyer (and future Supreme Court Justice) Thurgood Marshall in the late 1940s regarding school desegregation in Indiana. He wrote Marshall in 1948 “we are going to approach the various school boards again with petitions asking abolition of segregated schools….” He was part of a group of lawyers who drafted the “Fair Schools” bill which was passed by the Indiana General Assembly in 1949, legally ended segregated schools in Indiana.[10] The African American Indianapolis Recorder proclaimed “we assert this is the greatest forward stride in democracy made by the Hoosier State since the Civil War.”[11]

Willard served as the assistant manager of Madame C.J. Walker Manufacturing Company, the highly successful and well-known African American-owned cosmetics company, from 1947 to 1954, and then became the general manager until 1971, as well as Trustee of the Walker Estate. After the sale of the Walker Manufacturing Company in 1986, he served as a board member of the Madame C.J. Walker Urban Life Center, a non-profit organization which operated the Walker Building for educational, charitable, and cultural functions benefiting the African American community in Indianapolis.[12]
In 1970, Ransom co-founded the Indiana Black Expo and served as chair of the Finance Committee. He served on the board of directors of the National Conference of Christians and Jews, now known as the National Conference for Community and Justice. Ransom helped create the Concerned Ministers of Indianapolis, a group who focused on the integration of African Americans into the business world; in 1993, he received the organization’s Thurgood Marshall Award in 1993 for his dedication to civil rights.[13] Ransom became the first African American director of the Indianapolis Chamber of Commerce and board member of the Merchants National Bank and Trust Company.[14] Ransom was a partner in the Indianapolis law firm Bamberger & Feibleman from 1971 until his death at the age of 79 in November 1995.[15]

Willard “Mike” Ransom was recognized on numerous occasions for his influence on Civil Rights in Indiana, and the Hoosier state would have looked very different for African Americans if not for his and his father’s (Freeman Ransom) ceaseless activism and pursuit of equal rights. The family lived in segregated downtown Indianapolis in what is now known as the Ransom Place Historic District, listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1992, honoring the family for their contributions to Civil Rights in Indiana.[16]

[1] Madison, James. “’Gone to Another Meeting’:Willard B. Ransom and Early Civil Rights Leadership”. Indiana Magazine of History, 114 (September 2018).
[2] Jones, Jae. Willard Ransom: Pioneer in Civil Rights Movement in Indianapolis.December 9, 2017. Accessed February 12, 2019.
[3] St. Clair, James E. and Linda C. Gugin. Indiana’s 200: The People Who Shaped the Hoosier State.Indiana Historical Society Press. 2015. Accessed March 9, 2020.
[4] Madison, James.
[5] Henry Hedgepath, “Who’s Who,” The Indianapolis Recorder(1982), 3.
[6] Ransom family papers show attorneys' work to end discrimination.March 9, 2016. Accessed February 12,2019.
[7] Madison, James.
[8] Hedgepath, “Who’s Who,” 3.
[9] Madison, James.
[10] Madison, James.
[11] Indianapolis Recorder,March 12, 1949.
[12] Madison, James
[13] Pattillo, Rebecca. Ransom Family Papers, 1912-2011, 4. Indiana Historical Society. December 2015. Accessed March 9, 2020.
[14] Pattillo, Rebecca. Ransom Family Papers, 1912-2011, 4. Indiana Historical Society. December 2015. Accessed March 9, 2020.
[15] Pattillo, Rebecca. Ransom Family Papers, 1912-2011, 4.Indiana Historical Society. December 2015. Accessed March 9, 2020.
[16] Ransom Place Historic District, National Park Service. Accessed March 13, 2020. https://npgallery.nps.gov/AssetDetail/NRIS/92001650.

Student Authors: Melody Seberger and Robin Johnson
Faculty/Staff Editors: Dr. Ronald V. Morris, Dr. Kevin C. Nolan, and Christine Thompson
Graduate Assistant Researchers: Carrie Vachon and JB Bilbrey

PHOTO & VIDEO:
Willard Ransom, Indianapolis Recorder Collection, Indiana Historical Society.
https://images.indianahistory.org/digital/collection/p0303/id/180/rec/2