Photography by Kevin A. Roberts
Judge Robin Ransom
Long before Robin Ransom earned her law degree—and even longer before she made history as the first Black woman appointed to the Missouri Supreme Court—she was an 11-year-old at a bus stop in Fairground Park. That summer, Ransom’s father, Levert, enrolled her in a bowling league in South City. To get there, Ransom had to take two connecting buses to an unfamiliar—and predominantly white—part of town. Levert thought that if his youngest daughter could survive a summer spent partly in a new neighborhood, making friends, and picking up a new sport, she could do just about anything. Throughout her career, Ransom has proven him right. She has climbed the ranks of the judicial system, putting in time as a prosecutor, public defender, and then judge at the circuit and appeals levels. Now, she’s sitting on the state’s high court. Oh, and she’s still bowling, too.
Your appointment certainly matters to history; what does it mean to you? Whenever you are the first of anything, people are waiting to see how you perform. I always say that it’s OK to be the first; you just want to make sure you’re not the last. I don’t care what it is, be it your gender or your race, you want to go in and knock it out of the park and do the best that you can, so the doors remain open for others to come behind you.
How do you approach the job? I don’t get overly emotional about anything. I try to be a humble person. Someone once told me that the robe does not give you special powers. You’re no more intelligent or powerful than you were before you put the robe on. You have to remember you’re just a person trying to help another person or group of people navigate through a legal process.
So what do you think makes for a good, effective judge? The judge is a ringmaster of a circus. The circus can be well-organized and run like a smooth machine, or it can be chaotic. The judge should be the person in the room that most people don’t observe. The case is about the lawyers, the litigants, and the jurors. I’m just there to manage whatever is going on in the room.
What would your Supreme Court appointment have meant to your father? He died in 2007, but even though he’s not here, he is the person who gave me all of the encouragement to get there. When I was younger, we used to drive by the juvenile court building, and he’d always say, “Oh, you may work in there one day.” Well, I didn’t even know what the building was. I’d never been in trouble. Why would I be in that building? But it’s funny. That was the first judicial appointment that I had, as family court commissioner.
Your dad spent three decades working for the St. Louis Fire Department. Did his work instill in you a desire to enter public service? Yes. Both my dad and mom worked in the public sector. My mom was a secretary with the police department for more than 30 years. My siblings and I got our work ethic from them. They didn’t complain, at least not until we were older. That’s when my dad would talk about the stresses of working in a segregated engine house and how that impacted his career. But public service was still something that they were always very much in favor of.
Was it always a goal to get this far? No, not at all. I never moved my life around like chess pieces. My job has never been the definition of who I am. A lot of the people I hang out with had no idea what my job even was until I was put on the court of appeals in 2019 and an article came out in the St. Louis American. All of a sudden, people were, like, “Oh my God! That’s what you do?”
Bowling is still a big part of your life. Why did you stick with it after all these years? That first summer, I had a ball and I’ve been bowling ever since. I’m very competitive. When people say, “Do you want to go bowling?” I tell them, “I don’t bowl for fun.” It’s just a big thing for me. When anyone asks what I’m most proud of, I say my bowling skills and how far they’ve come.
