In a world that often relegates poor people to a life of impossibilities, those who escape that dire fate are viewed as extraordinary. Ruth Simmons, the former president of Prairie View A&M University, would be among them. She was born exceptionally poor, the youngest of 12 children. She worked the fields with her sharecropping family in Grapeland during the Jim Crow era. They had no running water or electricity.
She went on to earn a Ph.D. in romance languages from Harvard University and to serve as president at Smith College and Brown University, where she became the first Black president of an Ivy League university, before coming back to Texas.