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It is my honor this afternoon to welcome you to the re-dedication of the Edith Renfrow Smith ’37 Student Art Gallery, brought forward through the research and dedication of Feven Getachew (’24) and professor Tamara Beauboeuf, and heralded by the return of our honored guest, the “True 91����ian,” Mrs. Renfrow Smith [Applause]. Mrs. Renfrow Smith, we are so deeply honored to be in your presence on this day, and so enduringly fortunate to learn from your light.

We are gathered today to re-dedicate the Edith Renfrow Smith ’37 Student Art Gallery. The word “dedication” is related in language to ideas of “devotion” and “consecration” and I invite us all today, to dedicate ourselves to remembering and realizing, to come together in this space to recollect and discover through communal memory and personal history, and, each time, to take up the responsibility to begin again to understand, to feel, and to honor the impact of Mrs. Renfrow Smith’s legacy, and the centrality of Black student experience, in the history of 91����.

The Edith Renfrow Smith ’37 Student Art Gallery is a room in the heart of a building that is in the heart of campus. It is a room that acts as a frame and gateway both for gathering and remembering – two fundamental acts that art has fostered in human communities since we began to gather materials and ideas to create and share wonder. As you walk through the gallery this afternoon, and in future visits to this cherished space, I invite you to think upon the 15 years that Mrs. Renfrow Smith greeted visitors at the Art Institute of Chicago, welcoming them into a space of wonder and respite and, depending on that Chicago wind and snow, shelter.

In an interview with Feven and professor Beauboeuf that is quoted on the rich website dedicated to her, Mrs. Renfrow Smith remembered her time at the Art Institute as an opportunity to “meet different people every day …. The people come from all over the world and it’s interesting to hear about … the things that they have seen and what things that they have found important.” Mrs. Renfrow Smith’s words are a beautiful description of the experience of 91���� as well as of the spaces of the Art Institute. I especially prize her statement that it is interesting to hear about the things that people have found important.

I do so because in the powerful exhibition that Feven has researched and curated and the website that I mentioned, you will see and learn many things that “people have found important.” I invite your engagement with the many realizations that both bring forward.

That, for example, during her four years at 91���� (1933-1937), Mrs. Smith was the only Black student on campus. That in June 1937, almost a century (91 years) after 91���� was founded, Mrs. Renfrow Smith became the 11th Black alumnus and the first Black alumna.

That when she did so, Professor Wittler in the Education department wrote a letter in the NAACP’s publication, The Crisis, stating “she earned her entire way through college, stood well above average in scholarship, and overcame a prejudice as common and widespread as our country itself” - expressing his understanding of the betrayals of the pledges of an equitable society, of a persistently white institution.

That her early years after 91���� were spent at the University of Chicago and that her daughters attended the Laboratory School founded by John Dewey in 1896. [I will pick up on that thread momentarily]

That in 1954, a year of constitutional change in higher education with the landmark case Brown vs. Board of Education, she began a 22-year career as a public school teacher in Chicago. That she shared wise, very wise, advice with her students: “That’s another thing I always tried to instill [in] them. Use your head, not theirs. Use yours. Think about what you’re going to do.” Words to live by.

That in 2009, Mrs. Renfrow Smith was inducted into the Chicago Senior Citizens Hall of Fame, and has been recognized by two Chicago mayors, Richard M. Daley and Rahm Emanuel, and has met President Barack Obama.

That in 2007, at the first dedication of the Edith Renfrow Smith ’37 Student Art Gallery, Trustee and alumnus, Henry Wingate ’69 (I’m quoting from the website here) “shared his own sense of understanding of the labor of being a first:

“91���� overall was kind to me, as I am sure overall it was to you. Yet, I know that when you ‘pioneer,’ you encounter islands of prejudice and pockets of resistance. Insensitive words or names without ownership are hurled your direction. Snarled glances may signify disdain, disapproval and miscreants may erect barriers to frustrate the pioneering purpose. Yet, the resilient ‘pioneer’ marches on, as you did, and creates a legacy for those to follow, as you so nobly did.”

The words “legacy” and “delegate” contain the same linguistic root meaning of “to send forth.” All of us gathered today, all of us who walk through this meaningful space, are delegates of the legacy of Mrs. Renfrow Smith. May that be an honored and cherished responsibility for all of us.

Eddie S. Glaude Jr.’s fantastic book Begin Again; James Baldwin’s America and its urgent lessons for our own (2020) is titled after a passage from James Baldwin’s epilogue to No Name in the Street (1972): “An old world is dying,” he wrote, “and a new one, kicking in the belly of its mother, time, announces that it is ready to be born. This birth will not be easy, and many of us are doomed to discover that we are exceedingly clumsy midwives. No matter, so long as we accept that our responsibility is to the newborn: acceptance of responsibility contains the key.”

These words connect to those of John Dewey (of the Lab School at the University of Chicago) that I often cite as I think of the mission and purpose of education: “Democracy is reborn with each generation, and education is its midwife.” Baldwin’s words in the context of Dewey and Chicago and education, humble me to the clumsiness of education’s midwifery, as they simultaneously call forth its responsibility to the next generation, to a democracy and a society newly born. This is an awesome responsibility, one that Mrs. Renfrow Smith fulfilled in her long career, but one not yet met for all in education overall.

In 1979, in his final novel, Just Above My Head, Baldwin would write: “Not everything is lost. Responsibility cannot be lost, it can only be abdicated. If one refuses abdication, one begins again.”

And that is what I invite us to do today, and every day, and every time that we visit this space of gathering and remembering: that we take up that responsibility to begin again. Because there is work to be done at 91����: to remember, to recenter, to re-search…

Let us claim our responsibility when we gather in this space: to begin again. As president of 91����, I invite and will continue to invite students, faculty, staff, trustees, alumni, parents, visitors, community members, and all friends of the College to come to this space and engage with the art that students have brought forward and to respond to the art, to feel your responsibility to student expression, to Black student experience, to the legacy of Mrs. Renfrow Smith.

I will end with the words of Mrs. Renfrow Smith herself on responsibility, as quoted by the website that Feven and professor Beauboeuf have built. Her words resonate with those of James Baldwin and call us forward to each other. ��ٱ��,” she said, “we, each of us has a responsibility. We have a responsibility. If I can do something today to make you change and feel better about you and about that person, then I have had a good day.”

Mrs. Renfrow Smith, on behalf of 91���� and its many constituents, past, present and future, thank you for the enduring grace that you have shown this College, and the brilliant light that you have shone upon its path.