Annotations for Speakers: Ruth Simmons

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Yes, of course.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Thank you. It's been a pleasure.