“I used to be born at a crossroads: a crossroads in historical past, a crossroads in tradition, and a geographical crossroad in North Houston County in East Texas.”
–Ruth J. Simmons
Born in 1945, Ruth J. Simmons grew up the twelfth youngster of sharecroppers. Her first dwelling had no operating water, no electrical energy, no books to learn. But regardless of this—or, in her phrases, due to it—Simmons would turn into the primary Black president of an Ivy League college. The previous president of Smith School, Brown College, and Prairie View A&M, Texas’s oldest HBCU, Simmons has impressed generations of scholars as she herself made historical past.
In Up Dwelling, Simmons takes us again to Grapeland to indicate how the individuals who love us after we are younger form who we turn into. We meet her caring, tireless mom who managed to feed her giant household with an usually empty pantry; her father, who refused to let racial and financial injustice crush his youngest daughter’s goals; the doting brothers and sisters; and the attentive lecturers who welcomed Ruth into the classroom, guiding her to a future she might hardly think about as a baby.
From the farmland of East Texas to Houston’s Fifth Ward to New Orleans on the daybreak of the civil rights motion, Simmons depicts an period lengthy gone however whose legacies of inequality we nonetheless dwell with right now. Written in clear and timeless prose, Up Dwelling is each an origin story set within the segregated South and the uplifting chronicle of a woman whose mind, grace, and curiosity information her as she creates a spot for herself on the earth.
On Sept. 26 Simmons delivered the 2023 Nationwide Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Jefferson Lecture within the Humanities on the Smithsonian Nationwide Museum of African American Historical past and Tradition in D.C. Two weeks prior, Simmons mentioned her new memoir, Up Dwelling: One Lady’s Journey on the Opal Johnson Smith Auditorium in Prairie View, TX.
Right here is that lecture/dialogue on your viewing pleasure.
