Betty Ransom
Betty's story
Betty Ransom’s Springfield roots run deep, at least to the late 1800s and perhaps further. “The research I was doing came to an end when we couldn’t find the slave owner’s name,” she told us.
With her husband, she built on that history. “We said, ‘This is our home, and we’ll always be here.’ I think it’s good to make a name for yourself where you are and to try to make progress for your own community. And I think that we did a pretty good job of that.”
They shared values, goals and ambition, which helped them as they built a business and played important roles in the local chapter of the NAACP – all while raising eight children.
And most of all, they did things together. “If you saw one of us, you saw the other,” she remembered. “He’s been dead for 12 years, and I miss him very much."
Betty worries that decades after the milestones of the Civil Rights Movement, there are people “keeping this stuff going. The older ones are telling the younger ones, so how are you going to get out of this mire? It’s like quicksand. You get in there, and you can’t hardly get out. Unless you turn a deaf ear to what’s being said and go on and do what you have to do.”
But then like others we interviewed, she’s concerned that this polite distance is a barrier to true progress. She said, “We say things we’re supposed to say to get along. If we would be down-to-earth and honest about it, that’s the only way things would change.”
Documenting the past is important, too. She said, “It’s sad to me because I really love Springfield. I love Springfield,” she repeated. “I might not love all the people in it, but I love Springfield. And I hate to see our history being forgotten.”