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Welcome to our new episode of This is Democracy. Today, we are joined by an author, professor, scholar of Barbara Jordan's life. Barbara Jordan, as we'll discuss, was a pioneering legislator and pioneering politician and civil rights activist in the United States. She left an incredible legacy, and we're fortunate today to have an opportunity to talk about Barbara Jordan and her legacy, and what that legacy means in the tumultuous world we live in now.

We're going to discuss Barbara Jordan's life and legacy with Professor Mary Ellen Curtin. Mary Ellen Curtin is an associate professor in the Department of Critical Race, Gender and Culture studies and director of American Studies at American University in Washington, DC, which has a beautiful campus. It's a university I always enjoy visiting.

Mary Ellen is the author of two books, the book she wrote a number of years ago Black Prisoners and Their World Alabama, 1865-1900 really a pioneering book looking at convict labor and the use of convict labor in the justice and political system in Alabama and much of the South during the second half of the 19th century, and most recently, the book we're going to discuss today, the book I hope everyone will purchase and read, is called She Changed the Nation: Barbara Jordan's Life and Legacy in Black Politics. It's hot off the presses, and as soon as it came out, I grabbed a copy and made sure to read it. And it's really an extraordinary book about Barbara Jordan and her life. Mary Ellen, thank you for joining us.

Oh, thank you for having me. Jeremi, it's such a pleasure to be here.

Before we get into our discussion of Barbara Jordan with Mary Ellen Curtin, we have, of course, Mr. Zachary Suri's scene setting poem. What's the title of your poem today, Zachary?

"Trailblazer."

Let's hear it.

The one who breaks the ceiling, the one who's first to cross the line, they must make their own rhythm. They must beat to their own time. They find themselves quite often alone or in the dust. They find themselves quite often lest to wallow or to rust. And so they must know more than anyone else to take their own story right off of the shelf. The one who breaks the ceiling as glass shattered in their eyes, the one who makes the first move must break through all the lies. They find themselves quite often defeated or ignored. They find themselves quite often hated and abhorred. And so they must fight, more than anything still to make their way over the widening hill. And sometimes they fail, and sometimes they will, but always, they face it with a radical grin.

I love that closing line. Radical grin. Mary Ellen, I saw you reacting to the poem. What do you think?

Beautiful, beautiful. And I think you capture the complexities, the nuances, the contradictions of being the first. It's not all glory, for sure. Thank you so much.

Thank you. Thank you.

What's your poem about, Zachary?

My poem is about, as she just said, the contradictions and the nuances of having to be the first and not just the personal toll it takes on someone, but sort of almost impossible expectations that one has to (yes, yes) the level of resiliency and hope that one has to display.

Yes, well said. Well said. Mary Ellen, why did you write this book about Barbara Jordan and all the things she did as the first?

Well, that's a good question. So I had just been finishing my first book, and I'm glad I wrote, even though the the topics are quite different in a way, where they come together is that I'm a historian of the African American, Black experience, and so in my first book, I really try and elevate the voices and experience of people who were incarcerated. And that was, you know, rather than just looking at the system from the top down, which, of course, you have to understand, but to do everything I could to try and recover those voices, the letters, the pardon papers, anything that could really shed light on how the men and women themselves who were incarcerated were experiencing forced labor, and their resiliency, and how they tried to overcome and surpass such a living in such a terrible system.

And so I was finishing that, and Barbara Jordan had just died, actually, and something in me just really stirred, because I remembered her from when I was a teenager in the 1970s. And I just thought, Oh, my goodness, you know what happened to her? I knew, of course, about her, but you know, I hadn't heard about her for, you know, a while, and it seemed to me, in retrospect, that she was just kind of out there by herself. Here I was in graduate, had been in graduate school, had been studying Black history, civil rights, and she was barely mentioned, you know, just kind of a footnote as just a first, but nothing else.

And I just thought, there has to be some connection here between this amazing woman and all these other movements of the time. But I just didn't know what it was. I didn't know how she fit into the broader struggle for Black freedom and for women's rights. And so I thought, you know, I want to find that out. So that really stirred a question in me.

And when I was researching this, really my training in Black history pushed me to look at the whole context of her community and to raise up those Black voices that I think had been left out if we just look at her as an individual, right, rather than the product of a community, a place, a time. So that's one of the things I try and capture in the book, is that context.

I think you do an extraordinary job with that. I learned so much about Houston and so much about what it was like to be a lawyer, as Barbara Jordan was from 1959 until the mid 1960s and then what it was like to run races in Houston and to lose races, as she did her first few times through. There's so many things in which she was the first, (correct) just as Zachary indicated in his poem, she was one of only three Black women, you say, who became a lawyer in Texas in 1959, one of only three Black women. Then she was the first African American woman in the Texas Senate, in the state legislature, and then the first African American woman from the South in the US Congress. And that's when she was elected in 1972 when I was born. It's not that long ago. (No, no, it isn't. It is not.) What What made this moment that she was in such a moment of change?

That's a great question. Well, I think it was a sort of a long time coming, and that's why half of the book is really about Houston and getting to that point of being elected to the Texas Legislature. You know, I really think it's important, as you say, Jeremi, to sort of go back and think about where we were in 1960 when it comes to electoral politics. There were no African Americans in the South who were serving in any state legislature, none. So we're really starting from zero, you know, at that point, and also the Democratic Party in the South was still largely a party run by conservatives. It's a party that does not welcome Black participation.

And Houston, however, is a bit of an outlier. This is why I think she was uniquely poised to make this stand and to succeed. It's because Houston had been a hotbed of activism for Black voting, and this goes back to the 1940s and I described this movement that was led by her Minister, the Reverend Albert Lucas, who worked with Thurgood Marshall. Reverend Lucas was head of the statewide NAACP, and he and Marshall, together really forged not just a court case, but a social movement behind what the case that became, Smith V. Allwright, and so Lucas was one of the first civil rights leaders who used the church to educate ordinary Black people about political issues and to use the pulpit as a means of political education and political mobilization.

And we're going to see this later, of course, in the what we think of as Civil Rights Movement. But he was doing this in the 1940s and it had an impact. And so after this case, which got rid of one of the most egregious forms of disfranchisement, the White primary, Black citizens in Houston were then able to participate in those primary elections from the mid 40s through, you know, the 50s and the 60s, and they very gradually, are having an impact on that party politics. And they join in with, eventually in the Kennedy campaign, which extraordinary. Kennedy won Texas in 1960 so (just barely) yes, just barely.

But voter registration among, and Barbara Jordan was a big part of that, in as a young lawyer coming back to Houston and being part of a voter registration campaign. So she's very proud of her role in that, and then continues to work with this alliance of liberals, late White liberals and labor leaders they call themselves the Democratic coalition in Houston. It's the Harris County Democrats, and they are the liberals who are opposed to the conservative control of the Democratic Party.

So as you can see, it's a kind of constellation of forces. She's an extraordinary individual. But there's a movement among, now, you have Black voters joining forces with liberals and labor to try and create a coalition to elect more liberal Democrats. It's a one party state, after all, (right, right) into office. So when Jordan is running now, okay, the obstacle of the White primary has been removed. But the there are other obstacles to voting. There are other forms of disfranchisement that still exist: the poll tax, for example. But the most terrible one for her, from her perspective, was malapportionment. This is before the Voting Rights Act, and so you have a terribly malapportioned Texas State Legislature. And in her case, the Senate was an institution where all of Houston with a million people had one senator, and then you had rural districts with only a few 1000 people, had a senator too.

And so because of a series of court cases, beginning with Baker V. Carr, liberals and other activists brought lawsuits that challenge the malapportionment and forced a redistricting of the Texas Senate, and eventually the House, but that comes later. So when Jordan is running in '62 she loses. She loses again in '64. And really this is a result of not just so much losing votes, but also a reluctance of people, of Whites, to vote for a Black woman candidate, and then not having an appropriate district to run in. When she gets that district in 1966, finally Houston has four senators now. So this is new. And the way the lines are drawn, the way it was explained to me, it was, it was not drawn with her in mind. That suit was brought to bring greater power to labor and to urban populations, but the way the district was drawn, it was just simply that it was slightly a Black majority, just not quite even, I would say, a Black majority, but it was favorable to her.

She still had run in a primary race against a White liberal male who actually, you know, said some very terrible things about her, and it was a real struggle for her to win that race against somebody who should have been in her corner. So there's many layers of disfranchisement here (yes) and racism, as Zachary pointed out, that she faced when she triumphed in '66 and the biggest thing was at the end was, will you accept a Black woman as your leader? Will you accept a Black woman as a political leader and candidate? And she really had to push that issue. No one handed that to her. She had to struggle for everything.

Wow, wow. She was a trailblazer. (she certainly was, yes) Zachary?

What was her experience like in the state legislature in the 1960s, coming in on the heels of this historic civil rights moment? What was the Texas State Legislature like for a Black woman in the late 1960s?

Oh, my goodness, Zachary, you ask the best questions. All right. Those, as she put it, those men did not want her there, okay, however, the Texas Legislature is a small institution. Has 31 people. On one hand, you could say she did have allies because of this redistricting. There were other liberals that she had worked with as part of this coalition who were there with her. So in theory, you have a group of about 11 who could perhaps block terrible legislation and even find some way to promote good legislation, you know, progressive legislation, especially around the issue of taxation, fairer taxation. This had been, long been, a liberal goal in Texas, right?

But she faced all kinds of what we would call microaggressions. Now we use the term microaggressions. At the time it would just be, you know, people saying racist things to her unthinkingly, right? So part of this is that she is accepted. She knows many of the liberals in her coalition, and so among them, she's accepted. And yet there is, if you look at the journalism of the time, there's clearly a lot of very racist things that are said about her, either behind her back, and she is also placed in very, unlike Hughes, very sort of uncomfortable social situations where she's forced to kind of socialize with with people who are not used to dealing with a Black woman as an equal or a peer.

She brings out her guitar quite often, and she uses this as a kind of armor and and icebreaker, because people all know, you know, there's a Texas culture of songs, and this is one way she kind of establishes relationships with people. Jordan is a person who wants to establish relationships, and with friends and foes. She understands that to be effective, she has to learn the rules of the Senate and build relationships with people in the Senate, and so I think it's a, it's an important learning experience for her. She's trying to forge her own way. She understands that she wants to gain the respect of these men, both because she feels that is the way forward to efficacy.

At the same time, there's a lot of pressure on the outside from other liberals who say, if you adopt this approach, that means you are selling out. That means you're not enough of a liberal. And I think you know, she doesn't see that as an especially productive way to be. So she does forge her own way, which is about building relationships. But I don't think, from looking at all the evidence, that she ever sacrificed an issue, that she ever caved in on an issue, I think she's feeling her way and trying to figure out the best way that she can be effective, and I think she is effective to a certain extent.

She does also suffer some pretty bad failures, and one I describe has to do with a corporate profits tax which almost passes and then fails by one vote, which was not her vote, by the way. So I think there's a lot of misconceptions about her time here in the Texas Senate that emphasize sort of her as part of a system. But what I try and do is draw out the nuance of saying no, I think she's just trying to find her way and also is effective and does make some important stands while she's a legislator and continues to be part of a larger struggle for Black freedom. She's involved in all sorts of issues outside of Texas at this time.

It's interesting because one of the points you make so well in the book, and you make it repeatedly, is that there's a civil rights agenda that involves working in and through the system. That those who are marching in the streets, who Barbara Jordan certainly sympathizes with and sometimes joins, that's one approach, and a valuable and necessary approach. But your argument is that getting into the system and working through the system is absolutely crucial. Do you want to say more about that?

I do. I do. Thank you, Jeremi. Yeah, this is, and I don't think it's just her, like, this is when the movement is moving from the streets to the State House. This is Bayard Rustin's vision, right? From protest to politics. How can we be effective in making the ideals of the Civil Rights Movement real? And this was her quest, (yes) you know, this was really her goal, (yes) to do that. And no one knew how to do it, right? It hadn't been done before. (yes) And this is, you know, Rustin is good, like in theory, all of this coalition should work, but as we see over time, coalitions are complicated and messy, and everyone has their own agenda. How do you get people to work together who don't really have a long history and sometimes their goals clash, so people have to give and take, (right, right) and it's a hard thing. And, so, but this, I do think that she, and many others, Julian Bond, for example, we forget about him running and succeeding in the Georgia State Legislature in 1965. (right, right)

There's, this was part of thinking about the future. Where do we go from here? And you can't mandate interracial democracy. You know, the Voting Rights Act can make things, can correct, you know, the malapportionment, can correct the history of disfranchisement, but it can't mandate elections of Black politicians. That has to come from the ground up, and it really takes people with guts and ambition to do that.

So, well said, so well said. So, what makes Barbara Jordan famous is her election to Congress, of course, in 1972, the first Black woman elected to Congress from the entire South. And then, of course, during the Watergate Hearings, which you describe in here, are her extraordinary speech about the ideals of the Constitution and why presidents need to be held to the law, which is, you know, a little relevant for today, as well, explain that evolution in Barbara Jordan, to me, it's a fascinating part of this book.

Thank you so much. Well, I think again, we know her for this speech. I also think she played an important role behind the scenes in the Judiciary Committee. Again, this was sort of the Texas Senate. Now, in this committee, she's one of 37 as opposed to one of 31. And the goal here, again, working with her chair, Peter Rodino, is to create a consensus, bipartisan consensus. So again, this means being willing to talk with people who disagree with you, and trying to persuade them, or at least stop the negative effects of others, like, I think she's always trying to neutralize Charles Wiggins from California, who was a big Nixon defender, and she's always trying to intervene and neutralize his influence among the more concerned, you know, the men in the middle. They were called the men in the middle.

So there's that going on for months and months behind closed doors and then and finally, you know, the public has no idea what's been going on behind closed doors of the Judiciary Committee. And so you have the Summer of '74 when finally the committee is going to lay out its argument for impeachment and decide how to frame their articles for impeachment, given what John Doerr has laid out. John Doerr laid out 38 enormous number of possibilities, but they only, but they ended up concentrating on just a few. And these had to do with, as you said, the abuse of power. And I think, you know, there's a reason why she hones in on that. And I think the way that she frames the speech, however, is extremely important.

We all know that part where she says, 'My faith in the Constitution is whole; it is complete; It is total.' "My faith in the Constitution is whole; it is complete; It is total. And I am not going to sit here and be an idle spectator to the diminution, the subversion, the destruction of the Constitution." But what we don't remember is what she said before that line where she says, 'when this document was completed in 1787, I was not included, but now through the process...' And then she lays out all the ways that the Constitution can be amended to, right, Because through that process of judicial review, right, and additions, I am now included in "We the People." And here she's talking specifically about the 14th Amendment, the 15th Amendment, and the Voting Rights Act. So now I am included in the protection of this great document, and that is why it is so important that I fight for it, and that is why I believe in it so completely.

So that first part often gets left out, as though she is just, you know, blindly following some, you know, great American Dream, which she does believe in, by the way, but she also understands America's history of racism and and how important it has been to change and amend that Constitution to protect the rights of Black people. This is what gives her a great stake in this document. And this is why she's so angry at how Richard Nixon has defiled the Constitution.

You know, the combination, Mary Ellen, of faith in the system, articulateness, the way she speaks, that voice, as you call it, right, that deep, resonant voice with the high minded articulation. It reminds me so much, as I think about it, of someone else we talked to a few months ago, Ruth Simmons, who also comes from this part of Texas, grew up in the Fifth Ward of Houston, in part after her family moved from a rural sharecropping area. And Ruth kind of sounds like like Barbara Jordan, tell us about the voice, about the way of carrying oneself? Your book is wonderful on that.

Thank you so much. Well, they went to the same high school. They both went to Phyllis Wheatley High School. I think for Barbara Jordan, this is very much, her voice is a Black voice. (totally) I mean, it comes from her family, the institutions of this, of her training as a debater, to be sure, the church that she grew up listening to as a young girl, Reverend Lucas. But it even goes back further than that, because everyone around her said 'she always talked like that.' And I think her grandfather, who was the first person in her life, her Grandpa Patten, as she called him, who made her recite for him. And in one interview, somebody said, well, her first, one of her first biographers said, 'How did you learn to talk like that?' and she said, 'at my grandfather's knee.'

And he is a very interesting figure, a very much a self-taught person who had a very tragic life, who had been incarcerated, but who came back from that incarceration and really embraced her as a sort of protege. And so as a very young child, when she said, 'other people weren't really paying much attention to me, I was the youngest of three girls.' He really took a lot of time to be with her, talk to her, inspire her, and he made her recite to him. And then after that, her father wants to start his own church and realizes her talent as a young girl, as a speaker, and so with her, one of her sisters, she is also singing. I think a lot of the power of her voice comes from learning how to sing and and to perform before an audience and bring in an audience, tell a story through song, and also reciting for her father's church. So by the time she gets to high school, she is already quite comfortable with this kind of use of her voice, and then she gets involved in speech and debate and develops it even further. But it's through these Black institutions and her Black family that the value, her value as a speaker, as a speaker is acknowledged and recognized and supported.

It's such an important part of the Civil Rights Movement, if you think of again the high diction of Martin Luther King Jr, and you think about even Malcolm X in his own way, right? I mean, there's a way in which these activists are taking the English language, sort of as Churchill says, and sending it to war for them, right? (Mh-hm) Using it to articulate and persuade and motivate people, yes?

Absolutely they are. And for her, especially, this is what she brings to the nation, you know, a way she's able to crystallize what does the Democratic Party stand for? (yes) Which she does in the '76 speech at Madison Square Garden. Why should Richard Nixon be impeached? She has a real gift for distilling complicated ideas into a nutshell (yes) and to make them accessible to a wide audience. And I think she that is from the Black church. You know, that is what a minister is supposed to do, a good one.

And also, you have to make sure that people are responding to you. You're very aware of your audience, and she is always very aware of her audience. Giving a speech is not the same as reading out a lecture. It's a relationship. And that is something that has to be, if you don't realize that from early on, it's not going to come natural to you. And this is why you know at that convention, you know, John Glenn, if you're just reading a speech, (yes) you're not thinking of the audience as something that you are building a relationship with over time. It's just not going to fall right. It's not going to feel the same. And she really has that sense of what public speaking is truly about. (Zachary?)

How was Barbara Jordan viewed at the time? How is she perceived, in particular, by White political actors and and White politicians? You spoke about her oratory and the way in which she was able to articulate the Democratic Party position on Nixon, but how was she seen by White voters around the country. How was she perceived as a politician?

Right, that's, that's such a great question. Well, I think on one hand, there's always many hands. On one hand, she is admired, greatly admired and lauded. So when you have these polls like, what woman could you see as president? For example, she's at the top of those polls (Really? Really? Wow) by Red Book magazine. What could you see on the Supreme Court? She's at the top of those polls. And many people, kind of, you know, they it, she just makes it sort of look easy, like, oh, this is the next step, you know, in terms of women's progress in politics and Black women's progress in politics. I think on one, on one hand, she's greatly admired.

On the other hand, I think there are a lot of tensions, lingering tensions and resentments out of Houston and out of Austin, liberals who are never really trusting of her. They see her still as someone who is dealing with the enemy, you know, making deals with the other side. They don't understand some of her tactics, and she isn't really good on explaining to people like, okay, I'm gonna, this is, this is how I'm operating. Because politicians just don't do that. I think that, how can I put this that she has learned some skills as a politician that are hard to explain to people who are not in those shoes. So you don't always say what you think. (yeah) Now, you're a poker player. I mean, there's, she played poker. I mean, this is the way you do it. You, you do have to make agreements.

So, for example, with Robert Byrd, she introduces him at a party convention, at a mini convention (powerful senator from West Virginia) correct, who is going to play a very important role in the Voting Rights Act extension, she develops a kind of not, it's not a quid pro quo. It's never that bald, you know, but it's an understanding (yes) that, hey, here's somebody who represents the growing Black vote. This is the other thing that Jordan is never just about herself. A lot of her power, the perception of her power, comes from what she represents, which is with the Voting Rights Act, more and more Black people are registering to vote, and they're participating in primaries. And this is a new thing that Democratic, White Democratic politicians have to now take account of and Jordan is somebody who can explain this to them. (yes, yes) So, in terms of how she's perceived, I think it's quite mixed, actually, on one hand, the public perceives her very positively. On the other hand, people within Houston are still, and Austin, are still quite perhaps puzzled about how she was able to go so far so fast, and they are suspicious of her relationship with the power structure.

Yeah. Your book makes the case so well that she's not only a trailblazer, but that she actually provides some of the tools that those who come after her will use that people like AOC and various others will draw on from her. For today, for this moment we're in today, which is such a difficult time, especially for the ideals of Barbara Jordan, what does she offer us today?

Hmm. Well, she always acknowledged, and you can see this in her testimony against Robert Bork, for example. She always acknowledged the importance of court cases and protection of Black voting for the success of Black politicians. This was one reason she was so against Robert Bork's confirmation (Yes) to the Supreme Court (Yes) because he had said he had opposed those cases. He didn't think Baker v. Carr had been properly decided, et cetera. And she, that just appalled her (Mm-hmm) because she said, 'Well, if, if his way of thinking had persisted, I would not be here.' Right. 'I would never have been able to run and to win.'

And so she, she just said the Supreme Court has to protect individual rights, has to protect this right to privacy, has to protect Black voting rights. And so that, I think, is an important thing to remember and to understand. As much as we applaud her as a great individual, and even other Black politicians that we applaud as great individuals, to understand that they stood on the shoulders of those really important Supreme Court decisions and the movement to make those, that made those decisions part of our national fabric.

And now we're suffering a pushback against those decisions, and there's gonna be some, uh, uh, consequences to that, that extraordinary people are gonna, you know, even, like, you can have a lot of Black voting, but if the vote is not made meaningful, right, (Yes) through fair districting and other methods that were used to move things along after the Civil Rights Movement, there's terrible political consequences for our system.

I also think, though, that she believed in coalition politics. And, now we're hearing all kinds of criticisms about the party and, and perhaps, you know, there is gonna be a realignment, and a reckoning about what it means to be in a coalition. I think this is something that she and Shirley Chisholm and many others were always grappling with, and you can never really resolve, but it has to be faced head-on. So I think that's one thing she would say, too.

Do you think she would tell the Democratic Party today that they need to reach out to different voters in different ways?

Probably. I mean, I think she is a realist in that she would say it's very important to look at, you know, the evidence. From my mind, thinking about this, again, I don't know how you overcome, though, these Supreme Court decisions that have weakened the Voting Rights Act (yeah) and have really led to a very strange phenomena where you have places like North Carolina voting for a Democratic governor, but then they're so, but then you have overwhelmingly conservative representation in Congress, right? (Yes, yes.) Because of redistricting. How do you fix, I don't know how you fix that. I don't know. I mean, I just don't know. But I think those are the kinds of things that we really need to look closely at: how can we overcome that weakness in (right, right) in the power structure? (Right.)

What's so wonderful about your book, among many things, Mary Ellen, is that you deal with both the structural factors and the role of an individual. And you show that Barbara Jordan was an extraordinary speaker, thinker, coalition builder, a larger than life personality that allowed her to transform our politics, but she did it by strategically taking advantage of changes in her time. And I think that's the lesson, isn't it?

It is the lesson. And I would add one thing, again, that makes her extraordinary, is that not only could she mobilize Black voters and people who agreed with her, she was also really good at talking to people who had not experienced oppression (yes) and making them understand it. So she could speak to conservative White audiences, as she did time and time again in Texas, editors, White elites, and persuade them that it was in their interest to support change.

That's extraordinary. That's extraordinary. Zachary, as we close, do you think Barbara Jordan's legacy, can be inspiring for your generation?

I think so. I think certainly the legacy of someone who used the political system to fight for change, who used real politics to fight for change, should be an inspiration for us. In particular, in a moment when it seems like a lot of us have lost hope in politics. I think it's important to remember that, sort of, the dirty business of legislative politics is where so much change can happen with real leadership.

(Well said) I think that's spot on. Well said, Zachary. Thank you, Mary Ellen, for joining us today. I want to encourage all of our listeners to read Mary Ellen's really wonderful, entertaining, insightful book, She Changed the Nation: Barbara Jordan's Life and Legacy in Black Politics. It's really worth a read, and I will soon be assigning it to my students, so they won't have much choice.

Wow. Thank you, Jeremi. It's been a pleasure. And thank you, Zachary.

Zachary, thank you for your moving poem, "Trailblazer." And, uh, thank you most of all to our loyal listeners and our loyal readers of our Substack for joining us this week for This Is Democracy.

This podcast is produced by the Liberal Arts ITS Development Studio. And the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin. The music in this episode was written and recorded by Haris Khodini. Stay tuned for a new episode every week. You can find This Is Democracy on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher. See you next time.

[Music] This is Democracy. A podcast about the people of the United States. A podcast about citizenship, about engaging with politics and the world around you. A podcast about educating yourself on today's important issues, and how to have a voice, and what happens next.

Welcome to our new episode of This is Democracy. Every one of our episodes each week is special, but this one I really feel is super special, if I can say that, because we have on not only someone whom Zachary and I deeply respect, but someone who really has now written a book that tells a story that I think is so moving and so relevant and so uplifting for our time. And I can't think of a moment in our recent history when we've needed an uplifting story more than today.

We are going to talk today with Dr. Ruth Simmons, who has just published a fantastic book that I recommend to all of our listeners, Up Home: One Girl's Journey. And it is quite the journey that Dr. Simmons has had. She has been a pioneer in so many ways.

She is the former president of Smith College, then she was president of Brown University, and then after retiring from those two jobs, she came back to her native Texas and was the president at Prairie View A&M University, which is a historically black college and university, Texas's oldest historically black college and university.

And as I was telling Dr. Simmons before we started the recording, I have a few students in Austin now who were students of hers, and they speak with her with a reverence that is rarely heard for university administrators and leaders. It's really quite, quite extraordinary.

As we'll discuss, and as Dr. Simmons describes in beautiful detail in her book, she did not start out in an elite position. She did not start out with privilege. She grew up in Grapeland, Texas, the child of sharecroppers, and Dr. Simmons was the 12th child of her parents and grew up in poverty that most of us have never experienced.

And it's really quite an extraordinary story. Dr. Simmons, thank you for joining us today.

It's my pleasure. Thank you for having me.

We will start, of course, with our scene-setting poem from Mr. Zachary Suri. Zachary, what's the title of your poem today?

Well, it's one that's very appropriate for fall, “If the leaves could speak.”

You're just rubbing in the fact that you actually get a beautiful fall in New Haven.

I am, yes. Well, I'm going to be feeling the brunt of winter very soon. I think I have a right to rub it in for a few days.

Fair enough, fair enough. Well, let's hear your poem, Zachary.

“I wonder sometimes if the leaves could speak. What they would say of the glory they seek in learning to fly as they fall. If we should ask of them all, what right do you have to hope? If each one would be able to state and not for a minute hesitate. There is no reason or rhyme. I hope only because I remember a time when hope was illegal and wonder a crime. I hope sometimes for the world to freeze so I can ask of each hailstorm and autumn breeze what keeps you alive in the frost and the swift answer tossed. I keep going because I am going to keep the soil I plowed under my own two feet. The fruits of fields I've sown I shall reap. Wonderful is the coldness of this, the steely-eyed whisper that's almost a kiss that sees a truth that is most certainly true, but won't let them rest without paying her due. We are not eternal, but our hope can last and heal our wounds, a wonderful cast. Hold still so the dreams will be real.Hold still so the children can hear. Hold still so the gashes can heal.”

Wow, Zachary, you're channeling your inner Walt Whitman today.

Perhaps.

What's your poem about?

My poem is about the power of hope and curiosity even in circumstances that not only seem to leave no space for those, but seem to actively try to suppress and undermine hope and curiosity.

Well, I think that's a perfect place to turn to our distinguished guest, Dr. Simmons.

I was so moved by how you started your book in describing your experiences as a young child in what sound to me as circumstances that were almost impossible to learn and maybe circumstances where there was reason not to have hope. Can you describe for us how you grew up and how you managed to have hope in these difficult circumstances?

Well, first, may I just say how much I enjoyed Zachary's poem, and I even took note of some phrases that I want to hold on to for a while. Thank you, Zachary.

Thank you.

As you said, I'm the last of 12 children of Ike and Fanny Stubblefield who, like most of their era in the rural South, were consigned to work farms as sharecroppers. So when I was born, we lived on a plantation which had, perhaps, as much as 100 families living on the land and working the fields.

And the crop, the principal crop, was, of course, cotton. So it was fortuitous that I was the last because, as you might imagine, the oldest children were the heaviest workers. They were consigned to toiling in the fields to bring in crops.

And since that was the most important thing that they could do, they sacrificed school in order to be able to work the farm. And that meant, frankly, that the older children in my family did not have the opportunity to graduate from school. It was too far away and the work itself called.

So the younger members of the family were able to go to school because we moved away when I was seven years old. And when we moved away from the farm, we were required to go to school. And that was what saved me, really, that I could get an education.

So in spite of that, I would say that for all of my childhood up to my graduation from high school, we had a very bare existence as, again, most of that era and of that economic station had. We lived, we moved to Houston in Fifth Ward, and it was really a very poor community at the time with laborers principally and maids occupying the meager opportunities for employment in Houston at the time. So my father became a janitor when he moved to Houston and my mother was a maid.

Growing up, I understood in the racial environment of that moment that I was not to have the hope for a different kind of life because, as Zachary said, hope was illegal in that era, certainly for blacks. So the aspiration to do something significant with my life simply didn't exist. I was going to follow in the footsteps of all the women I knew who were maids.

It was only the fact that I was able to go to school and to be inspired by teachers and to love learning that I began to see a way different from what I was supposed to do. And that was through the good graces of teachers who inspired me, who encouraged me, and who did the most miraculous thing, and that is they were able to dream of a different future from the one we lived in at the moment.

And I often say that had it been up to us, we would never have anticipated that life would change so dramatically, and therefore we wouldn't have worked toward that end. But because they were not mired in that reality, they could dream of a future for us different from what we knew, and it was their dreams that made possible our aspirations.

That's extraordinary. And one of the many things that moved me in your book that you've just referred to are the heroic women.

You express in your book a lot of affection for your father, but he's clearly a problematic figure, and I'll leave it to the readers to read that. But your mother, your mother's work ethic, and then if I'm remembering correctly, Dr. Simmons, the teachers you single out are mostly all women. And to what, is that significant to the story? How should we think about women in this journey that you're describing?

I think the only reason that women are highlighted in the story, I clearly had the benefit of male teachers and role models, but in that moment of crushing need, men were not, and I was a girl, men were not able to put their arms around us and take care of us as parental figures. That would not have been proper, so to speak. And so it was the women who had no barriers.

They could, as you may have read, they could ask me to come to their house, for example, for dinner. They could put me in their car and take me places that enlarged my perspective about the city that I lived in. They could do, there were no barriers because they were women and really expected, in a sense, in this village, they were expected to do more, to be motherly and so on.

And so, but they were quite extraordinary. And most extraordinary of all, that I've wrestled with over the years, is the fact that they could be so hopeful. Because after all, these were, in many ways, the worst of times.

We had, this is before the civil rights gains. This was before Jim Crow was definitively eliminated. This is before really any robust integration.

So here we are isolated in our community, told that we could not achieve, told that we were worthless and should not expect much of life, and so on. And yet, here are these individuals who are guiding us to a place that's very different and instilling in us aspirations that go far beyond what we understand to be our limitations.

Where did this hope come from, Dr. Simmons? I mean, why was there not a div[e] into cynicism, which I sense a little bit in your father in some of the ways you describe him at times. How did these women, how did you find hope and keep this hope realistic and make it realistic in what are such difficult circumstances?

Well, as I say, I think they carried that hope for me for a long period of time before I dared believe it myself. And so, what is a child to do? If you go into a classroom and you meet a teacher who says to you that you are worthy and that you are welcome and that you are important, what is a child to do but to respond to that and to want to be better as a consequence of the positive attitude that the teachers have?

So in some ways, I think I was more trying to please these wonderful people who seemed so positive in a dark time that I was more focused on what I could do to make sure they knew how much I valued their enthusiasm and their help. And of course, as you know, my mother died when I was 15 and my world absolutely fell apart.

I was going into the 11th grade at that time and all of a sudden, these teachers rushed in to embrace me, to watch over me, to challenge me, to make sure that I knew I was not alone. It was a magnificent time for the teaching profession because at that moment, blacks had very few professional opportunities. And so, the idea of a brilliant black person who's educated and employed at that moment in the early 60s, let's say, well, there's only one or two professions they can aspire to.

One is teaching in black schools. And so, we were blessed to have teachers who were supremely well-qualified, very smart, very self-possessed. And we look today for people who are going in, if you look at college students today and you look at their professions, they're thinking about, well, I mean, one wants to be an investment banker, another a lawyer, another a physician and so forth.

Well, imagine all of that passion and all of that intelligence going into the teaching profession. That's what it was like in those days. And so, we benefited immensely from these spectacular people.

And I have to say, your book really describes the character of these teachers and some of them seem to me to be larger than life characters. And it's wonderful. It's one of my favorite parts of the book.

And I also do want to emphasize this was a public school and you're talking about public school teachers.

Yes, of course.

Zachary?

How did this early experience of education shape your experience in higher education through college and graduate school and then later as an academic yourself?

Well, I've talked a good bit about the environment in the schools and how inspired I was by these teachers.

But I should also say that I fell in love with learning, the power of learning, because it was the antidote that I needed to remove me from a sordid world. And by that, I mean, by reading, I could escape the Texas of the 40s and 50s. I could read about foreign environments and imagine worlds that were very different from the world that I lived in.

And learning about the existence of other environments rescued me and allowed me to believe that quite possibly there were other worlds that I could inhabit at some point. So I would say that by the time I was in high school, I was already enthralled with this, the power of education. Because, although, they could tell me that I couldn't go into a department store, or I couldn't go to a particular university or school, or I couldn't enjoy the full benefits of citizenship, they could tell me that, but they could not control what I put in my mind.

And it occurred to me as a young person that learning was the most powerful thing I could do, because it gave me absolute control over what I could know. And so, in a way, I would say that's what fueled my journey in education.

The fact that it was so important to me, that it rescued me, that it gave me hope, that it propelled me beyond what I thought I'd ever be able to do. I was absolutely sold on the idea that education was the most powerful thing that we could offer young people, and I wanted to be associated with it for the rest of my life.

And so it seemed natural for me to continue to study, to advance through graduate school, and to become a professor, because that was a way for me to certainly begin to express to students how vital it was that they care for their minds in the way that they care for others, their possessions; that they feed their minds in the way that they feed their bodies, and so forth. So, I wanted to inspire that same feeling in other young people, because it had done so much for me.

I could listen to you forever, Dr. Simmons.

That's mana from heaven, what you're describing. It's, I think, the mission of us as educators, and the power of education, opening up opportunities for people of all different kinds of backgrounds. You describe in your book your time at Dillard University, which is a historically black college and university in New Orleans, and then you begin to describe the transition to Harvard, where you did your PhD.

How did you make that transition, especially from Dillard to Harvard, going from what had been, through most of your life, largely African-American environments, to a world where there were not many other African-Americans in roles such as yours? How did you make that transition?

Fortunately, I had some intervening experiences that broadened my world a bit. The first was this conviction that I had that there was another world I needed to know about, and so I got on a Greyhound bus and took off one summer when I was at Dillard to go to Mexico to live with a Mexican family and to study Spanish.

Now, I didn't tell my family where I was going because they would have been livid and would not have permitted it, of course. But so, that was my first experience, really, being in classes with whites. And then I came back at the end of that summer, and I was able to go to Wellesley College for my junior year. And at Wellesley, of course, there were a handful of black students, maybe, not much more than that.

And so I had the experience of working and learning and being tested in a very competitive academic environment at Wellesley. But I came back to Dillard for my senior year and then graduated from Dillard, so the experience in Mexico, the experience at Wellesley.

And then I also had a summer in France at the end of my junior year with the experiment in international living, where, again, I lived with a French family and got to know a different culture. By then, I'm totally convinced that I need to know something about the world and that I need to know how to understand people different from me.

The one thing I knew I could not ever tolerate was to have the same narrowness of mind that had subjected everybody I loved to the worst possible consequences. And so I didn't want to be a racist. I wanted to be open to differences of all kinds.

And so, I was practicing this at a very young age and on a quest to test myself to make sure that I could be adaptable in different circumstances, and that I would be willing to reach out to people who were very different from me.

So by the time I, and then I had a Fulbright after Dillard, and I studied for a year in France. So by the time I got to Harvard, I had, I would say, a variety of experiences that helped me adjust to the circumstances of being a student, a graduate student at Harvard.

But how did you deal with the racism you most certainly confronted in all kinds of ways then and thereafter? I mean, what's extraordinary to me about your career, and we're going a little bit after the book chronologically now, but what's extraordinary to me about your career is how many times you must have been the only African American in the room.

Yes. Well, here, my mother's death had such a profound influence on me, and it did something that was very important. It forced me to think about who I was and what I had learned growing up. And as I dealt with her death, I was comforted by the fact that she had taught me many things. She taught me never to think myself superior to other human beings.

She taught me to be kind and generous because she was the epitome of both. She taught me never to separate myself from my family and from my people. And so really, I think what happened is I became secure in who I was, and I wasn't trying to impress anybody.

I was trying to be as deeply who I was as possible, and at the same time, be constantly open to learning about others, but never denying who I was. So I think it was being anchored in that way made it possible for me to be unshaken by these cultural experiences when people thought I was unworthy, when they thought I didn't belong, when they thought I wasn't good enough, and so forth.

That really never touched me in a profound way, but again, because my mother had done her work. She'd left me early, but she'd done her work, and she had taught me how to be strong in who I was and how to respect myself and not bend to the interests and the criticisms of others.

So I guess that leads to our sort of contemporary question for you, and we always like to close, Dr. Simmons, by sort of taking this history, and you've given us a very inspiring history here, and applying it to contemporary issues, not in a narrow way, but in a broad way.

I have many students who come from disadvantaged backgrounds into my classrooms, and I obviously can't change their home environment. I can't give them your mother, but many of them struggle.

What should we be doing? What is the role for educational institutions today? What are the lessons we can take from your story as we think about diversity and opportunity in our institutions today?

Thank you for that. I often say that I wrote this book actually for my students, because of all the questions I've gotten from them in moments of doubt and distress and disappointment. Because I don't think that young people today who are facing the extraordinary challenges that they are admittedly facing can understand that a life is made up of many peaks and valleys. And one can't always predict the value of everything one encounters, but there are things that you can do that will maximize the possibility that you're going to be okay in the long run.

And so, I talk to my students a good deal about a mindset that enables them to be hopeful about what they can ultimately do, and that mindset is one that emphasizes the importance of personal commitment to ongoing learning. Not [a] formulaic kind of learning, not a fixed syllabus per se, but an attitude about learning, which is: I am here to learn about who I am in the world and to learn about the rest of the world.

And that means every opportunity that one is afforded to build the knowledge of what is here in the world should be taken advantage of, even when it seems a minor opportunity, even when it seems that the person who can help you is not a very important person, it doesn't matter. And so what I like to tell them is that most of the time I could not have predicted the people in my life who would have been the most important in assuring my hopefulness and my success.

I couldn't predict that. I tell them about a woman, who was a maid, who had the most powerful experience on me as a learner and as a human being. I tell them about a man who was Jewish and who was my boss who criticized me so relentlessly to improve my work and he was my greatest mentor because he helped me to grow.

I tell them about other challenges that I've had that I embraced and because I embraced them, I was able to do something better, learn more and I think be a better person. So I think the most important thing for young people to know is that they cannot predict the way their life will go nor the opportunities they will have. I would never in a million years have said that growing up in Fifth Ward, Houston, being on a sharecropping farm, I would be the first African-American to lead an Ivy League university.

That would not have been possible, okay? And yet step by step, by learning, by being serious about my purpose, by being open to criticism, I managed to claw my way through a life that really has incredible meaning, I think. And I couldn't be happier today with what I've been able to do because I have tried every day of my life to live it fully and to take advantage of every opportunity to learn.

Zachary, I know on your campus, like on ours here in Austin, and throughout education, we talk about these issues all the time, but not quite in the way that Dr. Simmons does. What are your thoughts on this, Zachary?

I think that this is a vital reminder for all students, but also every learner, which I think is every one of us, about the importance of maintaining a love for learning, a curiosity, and also about the importance of education and of educators. I think it's very easy for students to forget that the secret to success is, as we've talked about, curiosity, always being willing to learn, to take new ideas seriously.

And on the other hand, we also need educators who will help inspire young people to be the best learners that they can be. And so I think those two reminders, the importance of educators and the importance of a love of learning, I think those are so powerful, especially in a moment where, and at a time in our lives when college students like myself, but I think also all of us are sometimes forgetting how much we love and enjoy learning and meeting new people and encountering new ideas.

It sounds, Zachary, like you're making an argument or applying Dr. Simmons' insights as an argument for the liberal arts, yes?

It is an argument for the liberal arts, and I think it's also an argument for the importance of good teachers.

And I hope more of my fellow students will consider, as I have, and as my older sister Natalie, whom many of you will be familiar with, has also considered and will likely pursue a career in which is a career in public service. And I think that this story that Dr. Simmons has kindly shared with us is only a very poignant reminder of how important learning is and how important those early moments of education can be for a child's life.

Dr. Simmons, this is the last question, I promise. What can our listeners do, in addition to cultivating this curiosity and openness that you display so well, what can they do to help others, to help the other young Ruth Simmons out there? What does allyship mean to you?

Yes, yes.

Well, first of all, I think the most important thing for us is to embrace the fact that there is talent and intelligence and potential in every reach of the country, in the poorest communities. And if we don't make it possible for children who are in underserved communities to develop through the interventions of support and education, then we are really missing our crucial function as citizens.

So I think I often encourage people to do whatever they can do to help children at any age, come into the world of learning. I'm absolutely confident that if we can get students to that point, they'll be fine, okay?

But we've got to get them to that point, because we're losing too many children who drop out, who cannot sustain any kind of upward trajectory at all, because the problems are too immense, and there's no hope in their lives. And so whatever we can do, join groups that are helping our children like those. There are so many of them.

There are so many worthwhile efforts underway, and everybody who has a care for these children should sign up to do whatever they can, whether it's working directly in a school, volunteering for a school, or any other organization that is helping.

I think you've given us very pragmatic marching orders of getting involved, rolling up our sleeves, and you've given us an inspiring, idealistic, but very realistic framework. Dr. Simmons, I want to thank you for sharing your story with us and taking some time to talk to us.

I want to encourage all of our listeners, who I'm sure are equally inspired by what you've heard, to read the book, because there's so much more in this book. As I'm sure all of you can tell [by] listening, Dr. Simmons is also a very talented writer, as well as a talented thinker and leader. The title of the book is Up Home, One Girl's Journey, and it's available everywhere for purchase, I'm sure.

Dr. Simmons, thank you again for joining us today.

Thank you. It's been a pleasure.

Zachary, thank you for your really beautiful poem, your insights. I think you brought together some of the points we were discussing very well and applied them to your own experience as a student. So thank you, Zachary, and thank you most of all to our loyal listeners for joining us for this episode of This Is Democracy.

This podcast is produced by the Liberal Arts ITS Development Studio and the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin.

The music in this episode was written and recorded by Harris Podini. Stay tuned for a new episode every week. You can find This Is Democracy on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher. See you next time. [Music]

This is Democracy, a podcast about the people of the United States, a podcast about citizenship, about engaging with politics and the world around you. A podcast about educating yourself on today's important issues and how to have a voice in what happens next.

Welcome to our latest episode of This is Democracy. I'm Zachary Suri. I'm hosting this week. We're mixing things up a little bit.

We often think about history in terms of pivotal years, 1776, 1848, 1989, and 1968 is often an entry in this list, identified by many historians as the key turning point in our democracy and democracies around the world in the 1960s. But our next guest, his new book makes the case for a different year, 1963.

Dr. Peniel Joseph is the Barbara Jordan Chair in Ethics and Political Values and the founding director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at UT Austin, and he joins us now. Thank you for joining us, Peniel.

Thank you for having me, Zachary and Jeremi.

In Freedom Season: How 1963 Transformed America's Civil Rights Revolution, Professor Joseph argues that 1963 marked the first critical successes and several important but tragic losses of the civil rights movement that would transform American democracy. 1963 was, he writes in the book, quote, "the defining year of the black freedom struggle." And because of the importance of this year and one of the documents it produced, a letter from Birmingham Jail by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., instead of a poem this week, we will be hearing Dr. King read a section of that speech and he will read what is perhaps one of the most famous sections.

Moreover, I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.

So, Professor Joseph, Birmingham and this letter play a central role in the story that you tell. It's the site of some of the most brutal televised police crackdowns on peaceful protesters in 1963. It's where MLK is arrested and writes this letter, of course. Why Birmingham? Why were the events there in the spring of 1963 so critical to the cause of civil rights and to the history of our democracy?

Well, Birmingham is very interesting because, as I show in Freedom Season, there were other hot spots and sites that might have become Birmingham, including Greenwood, Mississippi and Jackson, Mississippi.

But Birmingham becomes such a huge global site of struggle for dignity and citizenship in 1963, primarily because of the brutality that is experienced by peaceful demonstrators and over time by really thousands of young Black students who were called Negro students in the context of 1963, unless Malcolm X was speaking about them. And what's so interesting, Zachary and Jeremi, about Birmingham is that so Birmingham is a dying steel town. It's the citadel of the old Confederacy.

And what's interesting about 1963 with Birmingham, there's two competing governments by May of 1963 in Birmingham. Birmingham is shifting to a mayoral system from a three-person commissioner system. And one of those commissioners is Eugene Bull Connor, who's the rabid, not only racist, but anti-communist, who's a former radio sports broadcaster who gets his nickname for his expertise at shooting the bull, Eugene Bull Connor.

And what's so interesting about Bull Connor's Birmingham is that there's going to be an election. There's going to be a new mayor, Albert Boutwell, who's really sort of an elegant segregationist. But for a while, like during the first Reconstruction period, there's going to be two competing governments in the city of Birmingham who are both claiming that they are the official government.

But what Bull Connor does as city commissioner, not police commissioner, but city commissioner who has authority over law enforcement, is that he unleashes fire hoses through the fire department that are powerful enough to strip the bark off of trees. And they also unleash canine units and German shepherds that route peaceful demonstrators in Birmingham in April and in May of 1963. So really, Birmingham, even more so than the Freedom Rides in 1961, attracts global attention.

And even more so than the Freedom Rides in 1961, and even more so than the Meredith admission to Ole Miss University of Mississippi in September of 1962, because that's a concentrated episode. It's over three, four days. There's going to be a couple of people who are dead.

Meredith is going to be escorted by over 500 federal marshals. But there's also going to be National Guard and others deployed. In the spring of 1963, it's a slow rolling crisis that continues to build and build.

We start to get hundreds of reporters in Birmingham, including reporters from as far away as Sweden and France and other places who are reporting. And we start to see Birmingham become front page news in The New York Times, especially when children as young as seven, eight and nine years old are arrested in Birmingham.

And in your book, Peniel, you have a really wonderful chapter. It's the beginning of your spring section where you talk about a lot of these events in Birmingham. And two of the main characters of your book really come out in this chapter, I think, beautifully, John F.

Kennedy and in particular, his brother, Robert Kennedy and and James Baldwin, Jimmy Baldwin, as you call him. Why is this such an important moment for the Kennedys and for Baldwin?

For the Kennedys, one of the things I wanted to show in the book, Jeremi, was the evolution of Bobby and Jack Kennedy on race matters. And it's not always a complete evolution. It's not always a linear evolution, but both of them really have their finest moments vis-a-vis civil rights in 63 during that, the course of that year.

And so for the Kennedys, who are very reticent about not allowing civil rights to upend the administration and especially the administration's legislative agenda, which is the state of the union, as I show early, they want a tax cut. They want a big tax cut so that they can get portions of what become the Great Society past, including Medicare. That's what they want.

And they don't want the the coalition that they need, which includes Southern segregationists or Dixiecrats, to be so concerned about civil rights that they block the president's agenda. And Bobby Kennedy, who really serves as a kind of domestic and international prime minister, certainly the the second most powerful politician in the country to President Kennedy, is very wary of anything that might taint his brother's presidency. And what we're going to see over the course of the spring is the Kennedy brothers collectively, almost symbiotically coming to the conclusion that they have to lead in the context of this crisis and not just lead from behind, but to take some risks.

And Jimmy Baldwin, James Baldwin, the writer, is a big part of this. Jimmy Baldwin is an extraordinary figure in the book, but also just in American history. Born in Harlem in 1924, one of nine children, young, gay, Black writer born in poverty who flees to France in November of 1948 and really unleashes his literary genius in a series of novels and books.

Go Tell It on the Mountain is his first novel, and then Giovanni's Room and Another Country. And his nonfiction is really regarded now in the 21st century as he's the best essayist that I think America has ever produced, irrespective of race. Notes of a Native Son.

And what we get published on January 31st, 1963, is a book called The Fire Next Time, which is really this extraordinary book that is comprised of two essays. The shorter essay is called My Dungeon Shook, which was a letter to his nephew in commemoration of the anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, which comes out in the December issue of The Progressive, which is coming out of Wisconsin and Madison and Fighting Bob LaFollette, founded in 1909. And the second longer essay, which is the really even more well-known essay, is an essay called Down at the Cross, which was published in the November 1962 issue of The New Yorker as, under the title, A Letter from a Region in My Mind.

And that's a 21,000 word essay about race, democracy, slavery, memory, love, citizenship, dignity. Really the best essay ever written about race in many ways, I think. And The Fire Next Time becomes an immediate bestseller, and it really catapults Jimmy, who's already famous for Another Country.

Another Country is a massive bestseller. It's a novel about interracial relationships and romance, suicide, queerness. It's really his blockbuster novel in terms of its popularity, sells more than a million copies.

It is major. And sometimes we forget about that. And so when we think about Jimmy Baldwin in 1963, he is the most well-known writer, irrespective of race, in the United States and globally.

His books are selling in London, in France. He's in Istanbul, Paris. And the Kennedys come to know Jimmy Baldwin.

Bobby Kennedy had met him in 1962, already at a White House function. And throughout 1963, Jimmy is on tour, not just for his new books, but also for the Congress of Racial Equality. And he's going to historically white colleges and Black colleges, speaking about the need for civil rights.

And he's really calling for a reckoning, a confrontation over America's original sin of racial slavery. But Baldwin also wants us to really wrestle with the lies and the cover up. He talks about a crime has been committed, but what's worse for him is the cover up, the lies vis-a-vis American exceptionalism and the lies that everything is fine, we're all good.

There's nothing for us to wrestle with around racial segregation, around violence and terror and inequality and injustice in the United States. And so Baldwin really hammers at the Kennedys. He says he admires the Kennedys, but he's deeply disappointed in the Kennedys.

And what's interesting, Jeremi, about Jim Baldwin is that what Jimmy is, he's the incubator and a conduit. Everyone is talking and approaching his ideas and debating. That's William F.

Buckley, that's Norman Poderitz, it's the Kennedys, it's Black leaders like Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr., Gloria Richardson, Lorraine Hansberry. So he becomes the key figure and the key thought leader that politicians and literary salons and the New York Times and Mademoiselle magazine and the New Yorker and the progressive, but Black nationalists and Pan-Africanist and Marxist and Republicans and Democrats, they're all wrestling with Jimmy Baldwin, which is extraordinary. And that's going to inspire Bobby Kennedy as the spring progresses to actually want to meet Jimmy Baldwin and to hear him and listen to him.

So you're seeing these writers become political figures who are connecting high politics with the quotidian.

I think that's a very helpful overview, and obviously so much of your book focuses on these literary circles and literary figures. It's very much a sort of intellectual history as well.

I wanted to ask the moment that I think, at least for most Americans, we remember most from 1963 is probably the March on Washington, that moment. We all know the images from the Lincoln Memorial of people gathered listening to speeches from sort of great leaders of the civil rights movement. What made that moment on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial so impactful? And how do you see that moment fitting into the larger story of 1963?

Well, the March on Washington is an unbelievable high point, and I think the longest chapter in Freedom Season is the chapter 11 called The Language of Human Joy. Which really does an in-depth examination of the March on Washington, but it tries to look at it from different perspectives of people like Bayard Rustin, Malcolm X, the Kennedys, Howard Zinn, a very, very famous professor and author of A People's History of the United States.

But one of the key adult advisors, young adult, 41 years old to SNCC activists, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, a mentor to somebody like Marian Wright Edelman, Spelman College professor, really extraordinary figure. I would say the March on Washington is a high point because of the previous seven months, seven and a half months, almost eight months of activism and debates and conflicts and deaths, but also triumphs that occur. So the start of the year, Jimmy Baldwin flies to Mississippi to meet with James Meredith, who's the first Black student to enroll at Ole Miss, the University of Mississippi in Oxford, Mississippi, and he meets with Medgar Evers.

And really through the first half of the book, Medgar Evers is alive. He's the field representative, field secretary of the Jackson, Mississippi NAACP, a former military veteran with the Red Ball Express and providing supplies to our American soldiers in Normandy during the invasion, a football hero, a married father of three to Murley Evers. He's got three children, a nine-year-old son, an eight-year-old daughter and a three-year-old son.

Jack Van Dyke and Rena Denise is his daughter, and Darrell Kenyatta is his oldest born, middle name Kenyatta, named after Jomo Kenyatta, who becomes the first leader of Kenya December 12th, 13th that year in 1963. So Medgar Evers is this extraordinarily courageous and heroic and upright figure who I think we all know in popular culture because of his assassination. And I wanted us to see Medgar Evers in Mississippi, to hear him deliver speeches, to see the organizing that he's doing in Jackson, Mississippi, and also the constraints he's under because Roy Wilkins, who's executive director of the NAACP, is a very cautious, pragmatic civil rights leader.

He's a civil rights leader who's very competitive with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., constantly feels the NAACP is losing credit to competitors that don't put as much skin in the game, financially at least, as the NAACP does. And Medgar Evers is really at the center of these concentric circles, which include Roy Wilkins, which includes Martin Luther King, Jr., who's a friend of Medgar Evers, which includes young student activists who are connected to the Congress of Racial Equality and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, who want the NAACP to be a much more direct action centered civil rights organization, getting arrested, boycotting, being in the scrum. And we see Medgar Evers as somebody who's under the constant threat of death. I show the way in which there are white activists like Joan Trumpauer, who's still alive, who's getting arrested alongside of Medgar Evers at sit-ins.

John Salter is the half Native American, half white professor at Tougaloo, who's getting arrested and beaten and brutalized alongside Medgar Evers. And so what's going on in Jackson, Mississippi, I also look at what's going on in Greenwood, Mississippi in April of that year, where people like Bob Moses are being brutalized and arrested. Somebody tries to assassinate Bob Moses in April of 1963.

And Bob Moses is the Hamilton College graduate, philosophy major, mathematician, who later is a MacArthur Genius Award winner and author of the book Radical Equations, who is really one of the single most influential student activists of the 1960s. He goes to Macomb, Mississippi and influences and inspires people like Tom Hayden, who follows him into Macomb. And Moses writes that famous letter from a prison in Macomb, Mississippi, about SNCC activists being in the middle of the iceberg.

And the iceberg is a metaphor for the racial subjugation and the white supremacy that they're under. And Moses vows to resist nonviolently, to resist. And he becomes this figure who attracts really hundreds and then thousands of students.

And Moses, of course, wears the sharecropper overalls of local people in the Mississippi Delta. And that becomes SNCC's de facto uniform of blending in. And Moses does it in a completely ego free manner.

He's one of the most humblest people you could ever meet. He's since passed away. But with such deep humility, Greenwood for a while is on the front pages of The New York Times because of the brutality that's going on.

So when we look at the March on Washington, the March on Washington is a culmination of one, a very brutal winter where civil rights activists are hoping against hope and organizing that the federal government is going to be on their side and that President Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy will lead. They are very disappointed, perhaps none so as much as James Baldwin. But by the spring, Birmingham and the crisis in Birmingham gives civil rights activists an entree into compelling, coercing, shaming the administration into taking a moral stance.

Jimmy Baldwin sends the Kennedys a public telegram saying what's happening in Birmingham. It's their responsibility. This is a human rights movement, a human rights campaign.

And over the course of that spring, especially after the Mother's Day bombing in Birmingham, which is an assassination attempt on Martin Luther King Jr. at the A.G. Gaston Motel, you start to see the Kennedys respond and do more. And Malcolm X, who's in Washington, D.C., uses Birmingham as an entree to really become in 1963 a national figure. It's very interesting to watch all these different stories unfold, but they intersect, which makes them so even more interesting.

That makes a lot of sense. Of course, 1963 was also defined by two other tragedies in September of 1963, the church bombing in Birmingham that killed four little girls and the assassination of JFK in November of that year. What affected these tragedies? Also, obviously, public televised, what effect did they have on the movement and how in particular did the JFK assassination help change public sentiment around around civil rights?

Well, I think I want to stick for a second, Zachary, with the March on Washington just to talk about what happens that day, August 28th. I think 250,000 people come to Washington, D.C. and what's so powerful is the coalitions we're seeing of labor, labor movements, different social justice movements, political, religious movements. You've got Jewish and Christian organizations and secular organizations that come together. But you also have the left that gets in there, too. There are people who are socialist and Marxist and feminist at the march.

And so the march is really extraordinary in showing a kind of solidarity publicly in front of a global audience, including the Kennedys. The Kennedys invite the march leaders to the White House afterwards and they spend 75 minutes there. And what's so extraordinary about the March on Washington is that it's a generational march.

We see A. Philip Randolph, who is 74 years old and the head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, is the titular head of that march. We see Bayard Rustin, who is his lieutenant, former member of the Young Communist League, a socialist, a socialist and a social democrat who spends years in prison in Louisbourg as a conscientious objector, around the same time that Elijah Muhammad is in prison as a conscientious objector.

You see all these different stories coming together. Ossie Davis, who's a friend of Malcolm X's, is the master of ceremonies. And we, of course, remember Martin Luther King Jr.'s speech. And it's a 17 minute speech. We remember it as I have a dream speech. But he begins that speech with the words, now is the time to make real the promise of democracy.

And in that speech, he talks about reparations. He says, we come here to cash a check, a check that has been stamped insufficient funds, but we refuse to believe that the Bank of American Justice is bankrupt. So it's an extraordinary day.

And I want us to remember the electricity that's in the air that day, but that entire year. And in Freedom Season, I have John F. Kennedy telling his favorite White House staffer, who's part of his personal staff, his butler, Bruce, how he wishes he could be out there.

John F. Kennedy is telling the activists after they come in and these leaders, you know, that he's proud of them. LBJ is there as well.

So it's really an extraordinary day and moment, not just for the movement, but for really the idea of multiracial democracy in that sense. And that's important because it's a real high point that year because, Zachary, by the time Birmingham happens, the second act of Birmingham, which is the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing on September 15th. And there's four girls who are murdered that day.

And their names are Carol Robertson, Addie Mae Collins and Cynthia Wesley, who are all 14 years old. And then Denise McNair, who's just 11, are all killed in that blast. And two other Black children are also killed that day.

One is a 13-year-old who's riding his bike named Virgil Peanut Ware, who was shot by two white Eagle Scouts who tell the police and the authorities later that they wanted to see what would happen if they shot a Negro. And he's shot and murdered. One of the boys serves six months in juvenile detention and is released, and the other boy is let go and released.

And there's a 20-year-old, Johnny Robinson, who's shot and killed in the back by Birmingham police in the aftermath of a melee where people are protesting against the bombing that has just happened at the 16th Street Baptist Church. So those six deaths really impact James Baldwin. And I show, as we continue the narrative, how Baldwin is leading demonstrations and efforts at a Christmas boycott and a real searing critique of what kind of country are we that allows these six children to die.

And, you know, John F. Kennedy doesn't go to any of the funerals. And he's implored by Martin Luther King, Jr. in the White House to attend. And we have the tapes and he doesn't go to the funerals. So it's really an extraordinarily disappointing moment as well. Right.

And so the interregnum between the 16th Street Baptist church bombing, September 15th, and the Kennedy assassination, November 22nd, you see folks like James Baldwin who are getting a lot angrier and a lot more bitter about, and realizing what the stakes are, right? Real, real criticism. And so by the time of the Kennedy assassination, the Kennedy assassination provides a context for mourning, but it also provides the context to, and Merle Evers does this, James Baldwin King does it too, is to place Kennedy as one of the martyrs, like the martyrs of this movement.

So it's, and Baldwin says this at Howard University, November 30th, 1963, he says, we mourned separately the deaths of Medgar Evers and the children of Birmingham, and now we're collectively mourning JFK because Black Americans were bereft at the Kennedy assassination because they were his most enthusiastic supporters as that administration went on. So it becomes really interesting. JFK becomes part and the most well-known martyr of America's second reconstruction, but for much of the year, it doesn't seem as if we're ever going to mourn collectively any of the fallen heroes in this struggle for citizenship and dignity.

Peniel, at the end of your wonderful book, you connect, of course, the moment you've just described to the rise of Lyndon Johnson and how in this terrible, violent, chaotic moment, Lyndon Johnson, who was a largely ignored vice president by the Kennedys, comes into office and is able to create, as you say, a more powerful bully pulpit than any president had really had before, at least not in recent memory. And is the progress that's made, particularly in 64 and 65, the Civil Rights Act of 64, the Voting Rights Act of 65, where so many of us focus our attention, was that a necessary outcome of Kennedy's death? Would another vice president ascending to the presidency have done the same thing, or was there something particular about Lyndon Johnson?

Oh, I think that Lyndon Johnson is really the right person who steps into history at that moment. I don't know if another vice president would have been able to take command in the same way. I think that trying to make Kennedy's assassination and his death, trying to leverage that for the passage of legislation, I think most people would have tried to do.

And I think it's important for us to remember in the context of the time of 63, 64, 65, LBJ needs Black votes where he can get them. And we're thinking about states like New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, and of course, not the South. And he needs to hold on to a coalition that now has venerated the slain President Kennedy, and who's now this very, very iconic figure.

So in a lot of ways, being pro-civil rights was also pragmatic. There was no way to hold on to that coalition through cautious deliberation in the immediate aftermath of the president's assassination. So his instincts are correct.

LBJ had great instincts. And I think what's interesting about LBJ in 63 is that even months before the assassination with his Gettysburg address, his Tufts University commencement speech, him receiving an award by the National Association of Black or Negro Journalists. They're giving him an award.

LBJ had really, really stepped up on civil rights in very public ways, to the point where he became at least a part of some of the Kennedy private deliberations on civil rights, and was speaking to Ted Sorensen. The tension with Bobby Kennedy is always there, and with the assassination only amplifies. But he's in the White House on June 22nd, when Dr. King has both a private meeting with Bobby Kennedy and Burke Marshall, and then the very famous private walk through the Rose Garden with Jack Kennedy, and then being surrounded by the 28 or 30 civil rights leaders. LBJ is there, and he's speaking, and he's upright. He's there when they meet after the March on Washington. But he's also telling Ted Sorensen, and he mentions James Baldwin, that President Kennedy should use the presidency as a bully pulpit.

He admires Kennedy's June 11th speech, which I get in depth in, in Freedom Season, in the chapter, Kennedy's Finest Moment, but feels Kennedy should constantly use that bully pulpit. So he was much more willing to use, and much more understanding about the way in which the presidency, in and of itself, it provides a kind of ballast for whatever political situation you're in, because people are really looking towards the president, especially, I think, at this time period, 1963, than Kennedy. So I think Kennedy, and you could see it in hearing some of the White House tapes, Jeremi, with the ADA, Americans for Democratic Action, Kennedy's saying, and Arthur Schlesinger's in the meetings with him, saying, well, FDR's fire chats, he never gave more than four a year, and I don't have FDR's velvet voice.

So there's a kind of lack of confidence that Kennedy has, that really the polling disputes, right? He's a very, very popular president. I mean, really, in 63, at his lowest, I mean, he's still in the 60s, can you imagine, right, in terms of popularity?

And people want to see people want to listen to Kennedy. So there's a kind of underestimation of what he's capable of doing through the bully pulpit in a way that LBJ really embraces in the immediate aftermath of the assassination.

Yeah. One of the things I love about your book, Peniel, is you show a variety of figures, larger than life characters. We've talked about some of them, but certainly not all of them.

James Baldwin, the Kennedys, but also Malcolm X, a variety, Medgar Evers, all kinds of figures you touch on. And even though they have a lot of differences, they all one way or another are seeking to grapple with the problem of civil rights. And they're trying in one way or another from their own views to advance the country.

What do we take for today? I mean, this is where we always like to close the podcast. What do we learn for today at a time when our political leaders seem so unwilling to engage these issues?

And even those who care about these issues are afraid to engage these issues. University leaders are afraid to engage these issues. What do we take from this story that's useful for us today as we think about what you called in your prior book, The Third Reconstruction?

Well, I think there's three lessons to take from the book, at least three. One is this idea that really becomes universal in 1963, is that America must strive to be a multiracial democracy. And I think you see that throughout the course of the year in 1963.

And what's so important is that by 1963, in the aftermath of the March on Washington and the Kennedy assassination, we get a rough consensus by the aftermath of JFK's death, led by Lyndon Baines Johnson, that multiracial democracy has to be the beating heart of the republic. That's very, very important. And I think for at least the next 50 years until the Supreme Court's decision, Shelby v. Holder, 5-4

We had a 50-year racial justice consensus that was imperfect, but provided the most opportunities for historically marginalized groups to have access to building wealth, to becoming elected officials, to being educated at some of the best universities in the country, to being in corporate America, so on and so forth. And that means African Americans, but it also means women. It means South Asians. It means people who are Latino, just the whole gamut, which is extraordinary.

So I think that idea of multiracial democracy is really important, and the idea of building consensus around that. It's not unanimity. There's going to be disagreement of how we get to it, but consensus around the idea of multiracial democracy. The other lesson is about coalitions and coalition building. So I think throughout freedom season, you see the way in which civil rights leaders from the grassroots all the way to those who could have the privilege of meeting with President Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy and meeting with governors and leaders really were interested in coalitions.

They were interested in listening and learning from, but also debating with people who held different views than they did, but they were all interested in good faith advancing the country. So this idea of coalitions is very, very important. And then finally, I would say this idea of ideas and actions mattering.

So what's so interesting about 1963 is the way in which words and rhetoric and their ability to persuade people mattered. I think Martin Luther King Jr. is who we always look at, but it's Malcolm X, it's Gloria Richardson, Lorraine Hansberry, and then certainly it's Jimmy Baldwin, where Baldwin's words are so extraordinarily profound. You've got the right wing, the left wing, the middle of the country all trying to grapple with him.

William F. Buckley calls him an eloquent menace, and others say, no, he's this prophetic figure. Izzy Stone, I.F. Stone says he speaks with the passion of a Hebrew prophet. And so ideas matter, words and rhetoric matter, and I think we can see that right now in 2025, because I think there was a feeling before our current situation that if you had presidents who rhetorically supported civil rights, that that wasn't enough. And I understand that that isn't enough, but just the act of saying it actually was a much more positive thing for the country than somebody who's saying the exact opposite and belittling people and discriminating against people. So words really matter, and ideas matter, and placing those words and ideas into action matters.

So there's an intellectual praxis that happens in 1963 that is massive and national and monumental, and it's really global in scope, because there are students who are part of the Peace Corps and Crossroads who are going into Africa, who are going into Latin America, and those countries are also looking at the United States, and people are trying to walk the talk. They're trying to live up to their social, political, cultural, moral, religious ideals, which is really extraordinary to see. They don't always succeed, but the very fact that in good faith they're trying to live up to those ideas, it's really important to see.

And that impacts the kind of civic nationalism that really comes to a high point in 63, really the most important year of America's second Reconstruction, if we look at those years as 1954 to 1968 as the high points, 63 is the turning point, and it takes all those, not just deaths, I mean, there's also these triumphant moments. So I hope it's a hopeful story as well, because I got a lot of hope from being with Baldwin and being with all these folks, and I got a lot of hope from having a presidency and administration that, even with their flaws, really wanted to do the right thing, and at times actually did.

Yes, I think you've provided us today with a wonderfully hopeful story, although realistic, one that I think makes the case for 1963 as a critical year, not only in the history of our democracy, but of global democracy, which, of course, is the topic of our podcast every week. The new book is called Freedom Season: How 1963 Transformed America's Civil Rights Revolution. We highly encourage all our listeners to get a copy and read it.

Thank you so much for joining us, Professor Joseph.

Hey, thank you, Zachary. I really enjoyed it. And Jeremi, this is wonderful. And thank you for both of you for the work that you continue to do in these challenging times.

Yes, thank you, Jeremi, as well. And thank you to our listeners for joining us for this episode of This Is Democracy. See you next time.

This podcast is produced by the Liberal Arts ITS Development Studio and the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin. The music in this episode was written and recorded by Scott Holmes. Stay tuned for a new episode every week. You can find This Is Democracy on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube. See you next time.

[Music] This is Democracy. A podcast about the people of the United States. A podcast about citizenship, about engaging with politics and the world around you. A podcast about educating yourself on today's important issues, and how to have a voice, and what happens next.

Welcome to our new episode of This is Democracy. Every one of our episodes each week is special, but this one I really feel is super special, if I can say that, because we have on not only someone whom Zachary and I deeply respect, but someone who really has now written a book that tells a story that I think is so moving and so relevant and so uplifting for our time. And I can't think of a moment in our recent history when we've needed an uplifting story more than today.

We are going to talk today with Dr. Ruth Simmons, who has just published a fantastic book that I recommend to all of our listeners, Up Home: One Girl's Journey. And it is quite the journey that Dr. Simmons has had. She has been a pioneer in so many ways.

She is the former president of Smith College, then she was president of Brown University, and then after retiring from those two jobs, she came back to her native Texas and was the president at Prairie View A&M University, which is a historically black college and university, Texas's oldest historically black college and university.

And as I was telling Dr. Simmons before we started the recording, I have a few students in Austin now who were students of hers, and they speak with her with a reverence that is rarely heard for university administrators and leaders. It's really quite, quite extraordinary.

As we'll discuss, and as Dr. Simmons describes in beautiful detail in her book, she did not start out in an elite position. She did not start out with privilege. She grew up in Grapeland, Texas, the child of sharecroppers, and Dr. Simmons was the 12th child of her parents and grew up in poverty that most of us have never experienced.

And it's really quite an extraordinary story. Dr. Simmons, thank you for joining us today.

It's my pleasure. Thank you for having me.

We will start, of course, with our scene-setting poem from Mr. Zachary Suri. Zachary, what's the title of your poem today?

Well, it's one that's very appropriate for fall, “If the leaves could speak.”

You're just rubbing in the fact that you actually get a beautiful fall in New Haven.

I am, yes. Well, I'm going to be feeling the brunt of winter very soon. I think I have a right to rub it in for a few days.

Fair enough, fair enough. Well, let's hear your poem, Zachary.

“I wonder sometimes if the leaves could speak. What they would say of the glory they seek in learning to fly as they fall. If we should ask of them all, what right do you have to hope? If each one would be able to state and not for a minute hesitate. There is no reason or rhyme. I hope only because I remember a time when hope was illegal and wonder a crime. I hope sometimes for the world to freeze so I can ask of each hailstorm and autumn breeze what keeps you alive in the frost and the swift answer tossed. I keep going because I am going to keep the soil I plowed under my own two feet. The fruits of fields I've sown I shall reap. Wonderful is the coldness of this, the steely-eyed whisper that's almost a kiss that sees a truth that is most certainly true, but won't let them rest without paying her due. We are not eternal, but our hope can last and heal our wounds, a wonderful cast. Hold still so the dreams will be real.Hold still so the children can hear. Hold still so the gashes can heal.”

Wow, Zachary, you're channeling your inner Walt Whitman today.

Perhaps.

What's your poem about?

My poem is about the power of hope and curiosity even in circumstances that not only seem to leave no space for those, but seem to actively try to suppress and undermine hope and curiosity.

Well, I think that's a perfect place to turn to our distinguished guest, Dr. Simmons.

I was so moved by how you started your book in describing your experiences as a young child in what sound to me as circumstances that were almost impossible to learn and maybe circumstances where there was reason not to have hope. Can you describe for us how you grew up and how you managed to have hope in these difficult circumstances?

Well, first, may I just say how much I enjoyed Zachary's poem, and I even took note of some phrases that I want to hold on to for a while. Thank you, Zachary.

Thank you.

As you said, I'm the last of 12 children of Ike and Fanny Stubblefield who, like most of their era in the rural South, were consigned to work farms as sharecroppers. So when I was born, we lived on a plantation which had, perhaps, as much as 100 families living on the land and working the fields.

And the crop, the principal crop, was, of course, cotton. So it was fortuitous that I was the last because, as you might imagine, the oldest children were the heaviest workers. They were consigned to toiling in the fields to bring in crops.

And since that was the most important thing that they could do, they sacrificed school in order to be able to work the farm. And that meant, frankly, that the older children in my family did not have the opportunity to graduate from school. It was too far away and the work itself called.

So the younger members of the family were able to go to school because we moved away when I was seven years old. And when we moved away from the farm, we were required to go to school. And that was what saved me, really, that I could get an education.

So in spite of that, I would say that for all of my childhood up to my graduation from high school, we had a very bare existence as, again, most of that era and of that economic station had. We lived, we moved to Houston in Fifth Ward, and it was really a very poor community at the time with laborers principally and maids occupying the meager opportunities for employment in Houston at the time. So my father became a janitor when he moved to Houston and my mother was a maid.

Growing up, I understood in the racial environment of that moment that I was not to have the hope for a different kind of life because, as Zachary said, hope was illegal in that era, certainly for blacks. So the aspiration to do something significant with my life simply didn't exist. I was going to follow in the footsteps of all the women I knew who were maids.

It was only the fact that I was able to go to school and to be inspired by teachers and to love learning that I began to see a way different from what I was supposed to do. And that was through the good graces of teachers who inspired me, who encouraged me, and who did the most miraculous thing, and that is they were able to dream of a different future from the one we lived in at the moment.

And I often say that had it been up to us, we would never have anticipated that life would change so dramatically, and therefore we wouldn't have worked toward that end. But because they were not mired in that reality, they could dream of a future for us different from what we knew, and it was their dreams that made possible our aspirations.

That's extraordinary. And one of the many things that moved me in your book that you've just referred to are the heroic women.

You express in your book a lot of affection for your father, but he's clearly a problematic figure, and I'll leave it to the readers to read that. But your mother, your mother's work ethic, and then if I'm remembering correctly, Dr. Simmons, the teachers you single out are mostly all women. And to what, is that significant to the story? How should we think about women in this journey that you're describing?

I think the only reason that women are highlighted in the story, I clearly had the benefit of male teachers and role models, but in that moment of crushing need, men were not, and I was a girl, men were not able to put their arms around us and take care of us as parental figures. That would not have been proper, so to speak. And so it was the women who had no barriers.

They could, as you may have read, they could ask me to come to their house, for example, for dinner. They could put me in their car and take me places that enlarged my perspective about the city that I lived in. They could do, there were no barriers because they were women and really expected, in a sense, in this village, they were expected to do more, to be motherly and so on.

And so, but they were quite extraordinary. And most extraordinary of all, that I've wrestled with over the years, is the fact that they could be so hopeful. Because after all, these were, in many ways, the worst of times.

We had, this is before the civil rights gains. This was before Jim Crow was definitively eliminated. This is before really any robust integration.

So here we are isolated in our community, told that we could not achieve, told that we were worthless and should not expect much of life, and so on. And yet, here are these individuals who are guiding us to a place that's very different and instilling in us aspirations that go far beyond what we understand to be our limitations.

Where did this hope come from, Dr. Simmons? I mean, why was there not a div[e] into cynicism, which I sense a little bit in your father in some of the ways you describe him at times. How did these women, how did you find hope and keep this hope realistic and make it realistic in what are such difficult circumstances?

Well, as I say, I think they carried that hope for me for a long period of time before I dared believe it myself. And so, what is a child to do? If you go into a classroom and you meet a teacher who says to you that you are worthy and that you are welcome and that you are important, what is a child to do but to respond to that and to want to be better as a consequence of the positive attitude that the teachers have?

So in some ways, I think I was more trying to please these wonderful people who seemed so positive in a dark time that I was more focused on what I could do to make sure they knew how much I valued their enthusiasm and their help. And of course, as you know, my mother died when I was 15 and my world absolutely fell apart.

I was going into the 11th grade at that time and all of a sudden, these teachers rushed in to embrace me, to watch over me, to challenge me, to make sure that I knew I was not alone. It was a magnificent time for the teaching profession because at that moment, blacks had very few professional opportunities. And so, the idea of a brilliant black person who's educated and employed at that moment in the early 60s, let's say, well, there's only one or two professions they can aspire to.

One is teaching in black schools. And so, we were blessed to have teachers who were supremely well-qualified, very smart, very self-possessed. And we look today for people who are going in, if you look at college students today and you look at their professions, they're thinking about, well, I mean, one wants to be an investment banker, another a lawyer, another a physician and so forth.

Well, imagine all of that passion and all of that intelligence going into the teaching profession. That's what it was like in those days. And so, we benefited immensely from these spectacular people.

And I have to say, your book really describes the character of these teachers and some of them seem to me to be larger than life characters. And it's wonderful. It's one of my favorite parts of the book.

And I also do want to emphasize this was a public school and you're talking about public school teachers.

Yes, of course.

Zachary?

How did this early experience of education shape your experience in higher education through college and graduate school and then later as an academic yourself?

Well, I've talked a good bit about the environment in the schools and how inspired I was by these teachers.

But I should also say that I fell in love with learning, the power of learning, because it was the antidote that I needed to remove me from a sordid world. And by that, I mean, by reading, I could escape the Texas of the 40s and 50s. I could read about foreign environments and imagine worlds that were very different from the world that I lived in.

And learning about the existence of other environments rescued me and allowed me to believe that quite possibly there were other worlds that I could inhabit at some point. So I would say that by the time I was in high school, I was already enthralled with this, the power of education. Because, although, they could tell me that I couldn't go into a department store, or I couldn't go to a particular university or school, or I couldn't enjoy the full benefits of citizenship, they could tell me that, but they could not control what I put in my mind.

And it occurred to me as a young person that learning was the most powerful thing I could do, because it gave me absolute control over what I could know. And so, in a way, I would say that's what fueled my journey in education.

The fact that it was so important to me, that it rescued me, that it gave me hope, that it propelled me beyond what I thought I'd ever be able to do. I was absolutely sold on the idea that education was the most powerful thing that we could offer young people, and I wanted to be associated with it for the rest of my life.

And so it seemed natural for me to continue to study, to advance through graduate school, and to become a professor, because that was a way for me to certainly begin to express to students how vital it was that they care for their minds in the way that they care for others, their possessions; that they feed their minds in the way that they feed their bodies, and so forth. So, I wanted to inspire that same feeling in other young people, because it had done so much for me.

I could listen to you forever, Dr. Simmons.

That's mana from heaven, what you're describing. It's, I think, the mission of us as educators, and the power of education, opening up opportunities for people of all different kinds of backgrounds. You describe in your book your time at Dillard University, which is a historically black college and university in New Orleans, and then you begin to describe the transition to Harvard, where you did your PhD.

How did you make that transition, especially from Dillard to Harvard, going from what had been, through most of your life, largely African-American environments, to a world where there were not many other African-Americans in roles such as yours? How did you make that transition?

Fortunately, I had some intervening experiences that broadened my world a bit. The first was this conviction that I had that there was another world I needed to know about, and so I got on a Greyhound bus and took off one summer when I was at Dillard to go to Mexico to live with a Mexican family and to study Spanish.

Now, I didn't tell my family where I was going because they would have been livid and would not have permitted it, of course. But so, that was my first experience, really, being in classes with whites. And then I came back at the end of that summer, and I was able to go to Wellesley College for my junior year. And at Wellesley, of course, there were a handful of black students, maybe, not much more than that.

And so I had the experience of working and learning and being tested in a very competitive academic environment at Wellesley. But I came back to Dillard for my senior year and then graduated from Dillard, so the experience in Mexico, the experience at Wellesley.

And then I also had a summer in France at the end of my junior year with the experiment in international living, where, again, I lived with a French family and got to know a different culture. By then, I'm totally convinced that I need to know something about the world and that I need to know how to understand people different from me.

The one thing I knew I could not ever tolerate was to have the same narrowness of mind that had subjected everybody I loved to the worst possible consequences. And so I didn't want to be a racist. I wanted to be open to differences of all kinds.

And so, I was practicing this at a very young age and on a quest to test myself to make sure that I could be adaptable in different circumstances, and that I would be willing to reach out to people who were very different from me.

So by the time I, and then I had a Fulbright after Dillard, and I studied for a year in France. So by the time I got to Harvard, I had, I would say, a variety of experiences that helped me adjust to the circumstances of being a student, a graduate student at Harvard.

But how did you deal with the racism you most certainly confronted in all kinds of ways then and thereafter? I mean, what's extraordinary to me about your career, and we're going a little bit after the book chronologically now, but what's extraordinary to me about your career is how many times you must have been the only African American in the room.

Yes. Well, here, my mother's death had such a profound influence on me, and it did something that was very important. It forced me to think about who I was and what I had learned growing up. And as I dealt with her death, I was comforted by the fact that she had taught me many things. She taught me never to think myself superior to other human beings.

She taught me to be kind and generous because she was the epitome of both. She taught me never to separate myself from my family and from my people. And so really, I think what happened is I became secure in who I was, and I wasn't trying to impress anybody.

I was trying to be as deeply who I was as possible, and at the same time, be constantly open to learning about others, but never denying who I was. So I think it was being anchored in that way made it possible for me to be unshaken by these cultural experiences when people thought I was unworthy, when they thought I didn't belong, when they thought I wasn't good enough, and so forth.

That really never touched me in a profound way, but again, because my mother had done her work. She'd left me early, but she'd done her work, and she had taught me how to be strong in who I was and how to respect myself and not bend to the interests and the criticisms of others.

So I guess that leads to our sort of contemporary question for you, and we always like to close, Dr. Simmons, by sort of taking this history, and you've given us a very inspiring history here, and applying it to contemporary issues, not in a narrow way, but in a broad way.

I have many students who come from disadvantaged backgrounds into my classrooms, and I obviously can't change their home environment. I can't give them your mother, but many of them struggle.

What should we be doing? What is the role for educational institutions today? What are the lessons we can take from your story as we think about diversity and opportunity in our institutions today?

Thank you for that. I often say that I wrote this book actually for my students, because of all the questions I've gotten from them in moments of doubt and distress and disappointment. Because I don't think that young people today who are facing the extraordinary challenges that they are admittedly facing can understand that a life is made up of many peaks and valleys. And one can't always predict the value of everything one encounters, but there are things that you can do that will maximize the possibility that you're going to be okay in the long run.

And so, I talk to my students a good deal about a mindset that enables them to be hopeful about what they can ultimately do, and that mindset is one that emphasizes the importance of personal commitment to ongoing learning. Not [a] formulaic kind of learning, not a fixed syllabus per se, but an attitude about learning, which is: I am here to learn about who I am in the world and to learn about the rest of the world.

And that means every opportunity that one is afforded to build the knowledge of what is here in the world should be taken advantage of, even when it seems a minor opportunity, even when it seems that the person who can help you is not a very important person, it doesn't matter. And so what I like to tell them is that most of the time I could not have predicted the people in my life who would have been the most important in assuring my hopefulness and my success.

I couldn't predict that. I tell them about a woman, who was a maid, who had the most powerful experience on me as a learner and as a human being. I tell them about a man who was Jewish and who was my boss who criticized me so relentlessly to improve my work and he was my greatest mentor because he helped me to grow.

I tell them about other challenges that I've had that I embraced and because I embraced them, I was able to do something better, learn more and I think be a better person. So I think the most important thing for young people to know is that they cannot predict the way their life will go nor the opportunities they will have. I would never in a million years have said that growing up in Fifth Ward, Houston, being on a sharecropping farm, I would be the first African-American to lead an Ivy League university.

That would not have been possible, okay? And yet step by step, by learning, by being serious about my purpose, by being open to criticism, I managed to claw my way through a life that really has incredible meaning, I think. And I couldn't be happier today with what I've been able to do because I have tried every day of my life to live it fully and to take advantage of every opportunity to learn.

Zachary, I know on your campus, like on ours here in Austin, and throughout education, we talk about these issues all the time, but not quite in the way that Dr. Simmons does. What are your thoughts on this, Zachary?

I think that this is a vital reminder for all students, but also every learner, which I think is every one of us, about the importance of maintaining a love for learning, a curiosity, and also about the importance of education and of educators. I think it's very easy for students to forget that the secret to success is, as we've talked about, curiosity, always being willing to learn, to take new ideas seriously.

And on the other hand, we also need educators who will help inspire young people to be the best learners that they can be. And so I think those two reminders, the importance of educators and the importance of a love of learning, I think those are so powerful, especially in a moment where, and at a time in our lives when college students like myself, but I think also all of us are sometimes forgetting how much we love and enjoy learning and meeting new people and encountering new ideas.

It sounds, Zachary, like you're making an argument or applying Dr. Simmons' insights as an argument for the liberal arts, yes?

It is an argument for the liberal arts, and I think it's also an argument for the importance of good teachers.

And I hope more of my fellow students will consider, as I have, and as my older sister Natalie, whom many of you will be familiar with, has also considered and will likely pursue a career in which is a career in public service. And I think that this story that Dr. Simmons has kindly shared with us is only a very poignant reminder of how important learning is and how important those early moments of education can be for a child's life.

Dr. Simmons, this is the last question, I promise. What can our listeners do, in addition to cultivating this curiosity and openness that you display so well, what can they do to help others, to help the other young Ruth Simmons out there? What does allyship mean to you?

Yes, yes.

Well, first of all, I think the most important thing for us is to embrace the fact that there is talent and intelligence and potential in every reach of the country, in the poorest communities. And if we don't make it possible for children who are in underserved communities to develop through the interventions of support and education, then we are really missing our crucial function as citizens.

So I think I often encourage people to do whatever they can do to help children at any age, come into the world of learning. I'm absolutely confident that if we can get students to that point, they'll be fine, okay?

But we've got to get them to that point, because we're losing too many children who drop out, who cannot sustain any kind of upward trajectory at all, because the problems are too immense, and there's no hope in their lives. And so whatever we can do, join groups that are helping our children like those. There are so many of them.

There are so many worthwhile efforts underway, and everybody who has a care for these children should sign up to do whatever they can, whether it's working directly in a school, volunteering for a school, or any other organization that is helping.

I think you've given us very pragmatic marching orders of getting involved, rolling up our sleeves, and you've given us an inspiring, idealistic, but very realistic framework. Dr. Simmons, I want to thank you for sharing your story with us and taking some time to talk to us.

I want to encourage all of our listeners, who I'm sure are equally inspired by what you've heard, to read the book, because there's so much more in this book. As I'm sure all of you can tell [by] listening, Dr. Simmons is also a very talented writer, as well as a talented thinker and leader. The title of the book is Up Home, One Girl's Journey, and it's available everywhere for purchase, I'm sure.

Dr. Simmons, thank you again for joining us today.

Thank you. It's been a pleasure.

Zachary, thank you for your really beautiful poem, your insights. I think you brought together some of the points we were discussing very well and applied them to your own experience as a student. So thank you, Zachary, and thank you most of all to our loyal listeners for joining us for this episode of This Is Democracy.

This podcast is produced by the Liberal Arts ITS Development Studio and the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin.

The music in this episode was written and recorded by Harris Podini. Stay tuned for a new episode every week. You can find This Is Democracy on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher. See you next time. [Music]