This sense of myself came from my mother, who instilled in us very strong values about who we were. And this was quite essential at the time I grew up, because in that environment, in the Jim Crow South, everybody told you that you were worth nothing. Everybody told you that you would never be anything. Everybody told you that you couldn’t go here, you couldn’t go there. She would just constantly talk to us: Never think of yourself as being better than anybody else. Always think for yourself. Don’t follow the crowd. So we grew up with a sense of being independent in our thinking.
— Brown University President Ruth Simmons, Leadership Lessons
