Keith Ransom-Kehler – First Woman Hand of the Cause, First American Baha’i Martyr

From: Baha'i Heroes and Heroines 

Keith Ransom-Kehler became a Bahá’í in May 1921, but her first documented encounter with the Faith occurred a decade earlier, when she met ‘Abdu’l-Bahá in London on 13 September 1911. She mentioned the meeting in passing in her diary twenty years later, but no account of the occasion has been discovered. She may have learned of the Bahá’í Faith when she lived in Paris, where the new religion gained attention in expatriate and artistic circles around the turn of the century. May Maxwell, the focal figure in the early Bahá’í community in Paris, was a friend of Ransom-Kehler’s in the 1920s and 1930s, but an earlier connection between the two women has not been established.

Shortly after becoming a Bahá’í, Keith gained recognition as a Bahá’í speaker, writer, and administrator. In 1924–25 she served as secretary of the Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of Chicago … until ill health led her to leave for Louisiana. In July 1925 she chaired a session of the Bahá’í Congress held in conjunction with the national Bahá’í convention .. held at Green Acre, the Bahá’í school and conference center in Eliot, Maine; the topic of the evening was "The Economic Foundation of World Brotherhood." She traveled and lectured on a variety of Bahá’í topics, speaking at a series of meetings in Montreal in mid-1925 and, later that year, addressing meetings of the National Association of Teachers in Colored Schools held in Durham, North Carolina. In New York, between 1926 and 1929, her speaking commitments frequently took her to Harlem, where she assisted with a regular interracial "fireside," as presentations on the Bahá’í Faith involving questions and discussion are called.

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