It would be quite the understatement to say that Marion Ransell Dobbins has been busy since she graduated from the University of Virginia. She already had plenty on her plate when she was featured by UVA Today in 2012 while finishing up her Bachelor of Interdisciplinary Studies (BIS) degree through the School of Continuing and Professional Studies. As the Bristow, Va. resident will attest, it was the BIS program that helped to spark her interest and instill the confidence she needed to launch many of the endeavors she is pursuing today. In addition to continuing her work as a historian, which she maintained during her time as a UVA student, Dobbins is pursuing a doctoral degree and has a book release planned for this summer. Despite her busy schedule, she still makes time, each year, to speak to UVA Professor Ran Henry’s class about transformations through BIS – contributing to the School and the program that mean so much to her.
“BIS is such an inspirational instrument,” said Dobbins of the part-time degree completion program comprised of mostly nontraditional adult learners. “We brought learning experiences, because most of us were working. We had families. We had children. We had gone through many of life’s struggles, and so we brought that experience to the classroom, and it was enriching.”
Since BIS students must complete a capstone project during their last academic terms in order to graduate, Dobbins focused her research on the Civil War- and Reconstruction-era freedmen community in Falls Church, Va. where members of her family have lived since the 1860s and played a major role in the region, even donating land in the 1940s to build an elementary school for black children named in honor of James E. Lee, Dobbins’ great-great grandfather. Due to these experiences in the BIS program and her impressive performance as a student, it is no surprise that Dobbins went on to George Mason University to earn a master’s degree, with a concentration in African American Studies, after graduating from UVA. It is also no surprise that she has continued her career as a historian, now a doctoral degree candidate at Mason and serving as a graduate research assistant for the Center for Mason Legacies.
Dobbins is also a prolific ethnographer, expanding this role since leaving UVA and collecting more than 100 oral histories from marginalized communities in northern Virginia in written form or through audio tapes or video recordings. Her collections are housed in repositories such as Mason’s Folklore Program department for the Library of Congress and have been featured in an exhibit for George Washington’s Mount Vernon. She also shares her vast knowledge about ethnography, serving as a family and oral history class lecturer at Mason.
“I’ve been doing oral histories on my own for 30 years from my family and the African American community in Fairfax County,” she stated. “You know, I started oral history with my grandmother. I didn’t know it, but I started when I was in the fourth grade. We had to write an essay on some part of Virginia history, and I remember my grandmother talking about her ancestors who had been enslaved. She told me all the things that her grandmother told her, and I wrote it down, and that was really my first experience.”
Dobbins’ decades-long work in collecting oral histories is the basis for “The Lost Black Communities of Merrifield, The Pines and Williamstown,” her book about the negative effects of gentrification and systematic racism on three neighborhoods close to where she was born and raised. As Dobbins described, she is a griot, an African word for storyteller or somebody in the family that collected stories and passed them down.
“If you know the history of African Americans from slavery, we weren’t allowed to read or write. The law stated you could not teach a free person of color or an enslaved person to read or write, so the narrative was never, in most cases, written by the enslaved. It was always written by those who were the enslaver. To keep the history alive, we call a griot.”
At 65 years old, with a published book on the horizon and a doctorate in sight, most would think Dobbins might be ready to slow down. She has different plans, however. “By 70, I want to have it completed,” she said of her doctoral degree. “And by 71, I want to be a professor for BIS UVA, hopefully teaching oral history. That dash in between your birth and your death has to mean something. That dash for me is collecting all the history that I can, going around to the elders and learning about what they learned about from their elders and giving all of them a voice. And I do that now. I’m doing that through the book.”
“The Lost Black Communities of Merrifield, The Pines and Williamstown” will be released on June 3 and available for purchase through Amazon. Visit marionhistorian.com to learn more about this book and Dobbins’ other work.