On the cover of Ruth J. Simmons’s memoir, Up Home: One Girl’s Journey (Random House), her profile’s silhouette forms the crown of a tall tree. Underneath it, little-girl Ruth sits on a hill, her nose in a book, as she says was often the case during her childhood. It’s an apt illustration for a coming-of-age memoir that details how Simmons, a sharecropper’s daughter, made it out of the East Texas cotton fields and rose to the pinnacle of American higher education.
The first Black president of ...