Up Home

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Ruth J. Simmons grew up the twelfth child of sharecroppers in East Texas. Her first home had no running water, no electricity, no books to read. Yet despite this, Simmons would become the first Black president of an Ivy League university. 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 mother, her father who encouraged her dreams, her doting siblings, and the attentive teachers who guided her. 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. Up Home is both an origin story set in the segregated South and the uplifting chronicle of a girl whose intellect, grace, and curiosity guide her as she creates a place for herself in the world.