PhD student Kimberly Ransom uncovers Black childhood histories with support from Rackham

“Across this history, Black children have been paper dolls on the landscape of education,” Ransom said. “We haven’t imagined them as being innocent, naïve beings with their own youthful agency who deserve the protections and support we normally associate with childhood, like education. I want to insert the perspective of Black children as children—what they were saying, thinking, and doing in and around these schools, and how they may have influenced the schools—into historical education research.”

Kimberly Ransom did not come to graduate school to study history, much less her own. Apart from stories of her grandparents coming north from Pickens County, Alabama, in 1959, Ransom knew very little about her family history until she attended the School of Education, where she ran across something familiar—the Rosenwald school program.

The Rosenwald program built over 5,000 schools throughout the American South, providing a state-of-the-art education for Black children who were attending underfunded public schools. Most Rosenwald schools were white wooden structures, built on short stilts. Ransom recalled her mother describing exactly that kind of building when talking about her own school, and that piqued Ransom’s curiosity.

“After reading about the Rosenwald schools in class, I wondered if there was a connection,” said Ransom. She soon discovered Pickensville School, a Rosenwald school in her mother’s hometown, so she reached out to its alumni association and met member Ora Austin. “Ora knew my family, my grandmother, everybody,” Ransom said. “She wrote a book about the six Rosenwald schools in Pickens County, including Mamiesville Elementary, where my mother attended and my grandmother taught. That was my portal into what became an abyss of data that began to breathe life into a topic we don’t often talk about—Black childhood.”

Ransom found that the experiences of these students were often absent from the history of school segregation. She connected her discovery with wider trends that “adultify” Black children in the media, linking them with stories about police brutality, crime, and the academic knowledge gap, but rarely with traditional childhood attributes. This is a narrative she believed her new connection with the Pickens County Rosenwald community could help correct.

“I’m hoping my research will provide a window into Black childhood and what childhood experiences and agency look like through their eyes,” Ransom explained. She uncovered students’ diaries, yearbooks, old homework assignments, and other personal effects that told a detailed story about Black childhoods more than any official source. She found humorous essays and poems, but also found more harrowing accounts, like that of a young girl recalling the Ku Klux Klan marching through town. All together, her research uncovered a fresh perspective that showed students’ wonder, naivety, and agency even in the midst of the Jim Crow era.

With support from the Rackham Program in Public Scholarship, the Black Belt Foundation, and the Alabama Bicentennial Commission, Ransom and Rosenwald alumni began creating a museum collection to be displayed at the restored school and to commemorate Rosenwald schools in history alongside the stories of their students. By accentuating student narratives, Ransom hopes to add to the overall historical knowledge of Black education in America.