“Gone to Another Meeting”: Willard B. Ransom and Early Civil Rights Leadership

Abstract:Willard B. (Mike) Ransom's career reveals the challenges of the early civil rights movement at the local level. Young, impatient, and armed with a Harvard law degree, Ransom returned from World War II to become Indiana president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and to challenge the state's intense racial segregation. Ransom organized picketing of segregated restaurants, filed legal briefs, and travelled the state to organize NAACP branches. His sophisticated militancy led him to join the Progressive Party in 1948 and to run for Congress on the third-party ticket. In struggles within the national NAACP leadership, he challenged Walter White and supported W. E. B. Du Bois. As he led the fight for equality in Indianapolis and Indiana, Ransom faced opposition from African American moderates, anti-communists, and conservative Hoosiers generally.