African-American educator and the first Black president of Brown University, Ruth Simmons, was born July 3, 1945, in Grapeland, Texas. She was one of 12 children in a sharecropper's family. Vernell Lillie, her high school drama teacher, inspired her. Simmons won a scholarship to Dillard University in New Orleans; a junior-year stint at Wellesley College helped her discover what she really wanted to do—be a professor. Her education includes a bachelor of arts degree in romance languages from Dillard University and a master of arts degree and Ph.D. in romance languages from Harvard. "I saw what women's colleges can do for women, especially in developing self-esteem and in preparing them for careers in nontraditional fields," she says. She got her first academic job as an assistant professor at the University of New Orleans and went on to hold a range of administrative posts, including provost of Spelman and associate dean of the graduate school at the University of Southern California. Simmons then spent a dozen years at Princeton in various roles.
As director of Princeton's African-American Studies Program, she brought an elite circle of African-American intellectuals to the New Jersey campus, including Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison and philosopher Dr. Cornel West.
Reference:
Jet Magazine
Johnson Publishing