02283cam a2200325 i 4500 889030866 TxAuBib 20230921120000.0 230615s2023||||||||||||||||||||||||eng|u 2023010288 9780593446003 HRD 27.00 0593446003 HRD 27.00 TxAuBib rda Simmons, Ruth, 1945-, author Up home. Up home [BOOK] : one girl's journey / by Ruth J. Simmons. First edition. New York : Random House, [2023] x, 204 pages : illustration ; 22 cm. txt rdacontent n rdamedia nc rdacarrier Born in 1945, Ruth J. Simmons grew up the twelfth child of sharecroppers. Her first home had no running water, no electricity, no books to read. Yet despite this—or, in her words, because of it—Simmons would become the first Black president of an Ivy League university. The former president of Smith College, Brown University, and Prairie View A&M, Texas’s oldest HBCU, Simmons has inspired generations of students as she herself made history. In Up Home, Simmons takes us back to Grapeland to show how the people who love us when we are young shape who we become. We meet her caring, tireless mother who managed to feed her large family with an often empty pantry; her father, who refused to let racial and economic injustice crush his youngest daughter’s dreams; the doting brothers and sisters; and the attentive teachers who welcomed Ruth into the classroom, guiding her to a future she could hardly imagine as a child. From the farmland of East Texas to Houston’s Fifth Ward to New Orleans at the dawn of the civil rights movement, Simmons depicts an era long gone but whose legacies of inequality we still live with today. Provided by publisher. 20230921. Simmons, Ruth 1945- Smith College History. Brown University History. Prairie View A&M University History. Women college presidents United States Biography. Women educators United States Biography.