Teachers paved road to professional success for Simmons

Teachers paved road to professional success for Simmons

BY BRIAN BASKIN
Special to the Rice News

Growing up a black sharecropper’s daughter in segregated Houston, Ruth Simmons saw one day becoming a secretary as the loftiest of goals. Her teachers thought otherwise, preparing her and her classmates for “a different reality” – and that made all the difference, said Simmons, now president of Brown University, to an audience at Rice University Oct. 19.

JEFF FITLOW

Brown University President Ruth Simmons discussed the power of teachers to influence the ambitions of their students.

Simmons’ speech was part of Rice’s President’s Lecture Series of Diverse Scholars and the annual Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Lecture.

Simmons recounted how her teachers’ relentless push for high achievement laid the groundwork for her journey from living in dire poverty in Grapeland, Texas, to becoming the first African-American president of an Ivy League school.

In Grapeland, Simmons was “dressed in tatters and barely shod,” but that didn’t matter to Ida May Henderson, her first-grade teacher. When Simmons moved to Houston’s Fifth Ward soon after, the elementary school appeared to be overflowing with “countless riches,” from the books to the classrooms to the teachers. Especially the teachers.

The Fifth Ward at that time was isolated from the rest of Houston, and its residents in the early days of the civil rights movement were even more cut off from mainstream society. Yet educator after educator pushed Simmons to focus on the highest level of scholastic achievement, even to aspire to rungs not open to blacks at the time.

“There is absolutely no point at which I became convinced that learning was alien to who I was or to what I wanted in my life,” she said. “I’ve since learned that the most important element of education is whether we remain convinced that learning is a vital part of who we are.”

Rice University, which would not admit its first black student until three years after Simmons graduated from high school, represented both an ideal and a symbol of “all that would be impossible for me and mine.,” she said.

Degrees from Dillard University in New Orleans and then Harvard allowed Simmons to devote her life to breaking down the sort of barriers that undermine the biggest dreams.

“My effort throughout my career has been to teach how disparities across racial, religious and cultural division can cripple our future as a nation,” she said.

Brown presented a unique challenge for Simmons – the school had a progressive reputation when she took the presidency in 2001, yet was coming off a series of racially tinged controversies. Many alumni of color had a troubled relationship with their alma mater dating back decades.

Simmons discovered how to bring her message to the campus in a long-buried piece of Brown’s history. Some of the school’s founders, she learned, were likely prominent figures in the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

From that piece of 300-year-old gossip, Simmons assembled the Committee on Slavery and Justice, which between 2003 and 2006 unearthed the true story of Brown’s founders and searched for ways to turn that legacy of slavery into something good.

Simply bringing the entire Brown community together to explore its history did wonders, she said, noting that the committee’s work has inspired a Brown-designed history curriculum for Rhode Island schools, among other changes.

“The result (of the committee’s 2006 report) has been a shared perspective on our history,” Simmons said. “Because it’s shared, it unifies us.”

Simmons likened Brown’s experience to the botched opportunity after the Civil War, when the U.S. underwent a “forced forgetting” of its role in slavery. The process alienated whites and blacks in a misguided attempt to unify the country, she said.

“Forced forgetting sticks in the craw of those who believe” the past is not settled, Simmons said. “We can set things right. We can make peace with the fact that this country has not always been and is not perfect.”

Education is the means to achieve those goals, she said, not the least by giving a voice to those who feel they have been pushed to the margins of society. The more who are given a shot at higher education, the more who will participate in the national equivalent of what the Committee on Slavery and Justice started at Brown.

“What you do today and tomorrow in providing opportunities for students in every walk of life (to pursue higher education) will reverberate in their communities for centuries,” Simmons said.