The lauded leader visited Brown on Thursday, Sept. 7, for a conversation about her memoir, her time at Brown, the future of higher education and many more topics, speaking at the Salomon Center for Teaching alongside current Brown President Christina H. Paxson. The event came just hours after a celebratory unveiling of the newly named Simmons Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice — a nod to her leading role in the effort to uncover Brown’s historical ties to slavery, which led to similar efforts nationwide and innumerable initiatives aimed at increasing diversity, equity and inclusion on Brown’s own campus.

Simmons revealed that she had started writing the memoir during her time at Brown, until that role became too “all-consuming” to finish the project. She said she took up writing again during the COVID-19 pandemic and in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. At the time, she sensed that the United States had arrived at a crossroads similar to the one she had observed in her youth, when a burgeoning Civil Rights Movement set its sights on ending Jim Crow racial segregation laws.

“There was much bad news that happened… the revival of so much hatred toward different groups in society,” Simmons said of 2020. “It seemed to me that… young people were very much as I was at their age, and I didn’t think they understood the possibilities. I sensed that they needed to hear something about our having been there before, and about how it’s possible to live through those difficult periods and be stronger… as a consequence of dealing with them.”

Simmons recounted several early moments when she doubted her own abilities and almost turned back to East Texas. As a visiting student at Wellesley College, she enrolled in an advanced French course and quickly became too overwhelmed to continue. But when she went to the professor’s office to drop the course, to her horror, the professor waved her away with a “Ne vous inquiétez pas” — “don’t worry.”

“He said, ‘Just work harder,’” Simmons said. “I said, ‘But I don’t understand anything!’ If I had had enough money to go home, I would have left college that day, believe me. But guess what I did? I went to the language lab, and I studied and studied and studied. And I kept going to class. And one day it dawned on me that I was understanding everything in class. To know that I could overcome that enabled me to lose every bit of fear that I had as a student.”

It was that confidence, Simmons said, that carried her through graduate school at Harvard University, where she was the only Black student in her program, and later to Princeton, where she directed a new Afro-American studies program. What propelled her even further, she said, was a growing recognition of who she was and a burgeoning courage to stay true to her ideals.

“I was given bad advice I had to reject,” Simmons said. “I was asked to direct the Afro-American studies program at Princeton, and everybody told me that was a career-ending mistake. I could have bought that, but I didn’t. If you are not grounded in who you are, you will be pulled in lots of directions. So work on that first.”

Staying true to oneself, Simmons admitted to the audience, sometimes comes at a cost. When she announced the University’s intention to reckon with its historical ties to slavery, for example, the national uproar was so intense that there was a police officer outside her house day in and day out. Yet finding and maintaining a moral compass, Simmons said, is a crucial piece of effective leadership, because “people don’t buy… your saying one thing and doing another. They don’t buy your standing up for truth and lying. There has to be some coherence to who you are.”

Throughout the conversation, many in Salomon’s packed house entreated Simmons for advice, and she gladly doled it out: Read widely. Seek out challenges instead of getting comfortable. Find mentors who are bluntly honest, not coddling. Defy people who say, “We don’t do that here.” 

Simmons, who is now advising Harvard on its efforts to work with historically Black colleges and universities, also praised Paxson for her June community letter vowing to continue welcoming a diverse set of students to Brown despite the Supreme Court’s recent decision to ban the consideration of race in admissions. She charged Paxson and other higher education leaders to continue to fight for diversity, equity and inclusion at every opportunity. 

“I think [if] universities stand tall in this moment, [they] will have much more impact than almost anything they’ve ever done as a sector,” Simmons said. “I want to see student voices rise to the challenge. I want to see university officials rise to the challenge. ...We ought to speak truth in whatever circumstances we find ourselves. That can be scary sometimes, but if enough people do it, it's transformative.”