Grinnell College names building after first black woman to graduate

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Grinnell College took 91 years to graduate its first black student.

Eighty-five years later, and with increasing recognition as a figure in the university’s history, he is still around to tell his story.

Edith Renfrow Smith, 108, was honored Monday when college leaders announced she would be the namesake for the new Civic Engagement Quad at Iowa’s prestigious liberal arts school, founded in 1846.

Smith remains healthy and engaged, even though she is one of the oldest Americans and has been one of the subjects of a SuperAging study from Northwestern University since 2016, as featured on the “Today” show. Speaking to the Des Moines Register, she said she is thrilled not only to have the university bestow her honor on her, but that she is here to appreciate it.

“I think it’s the most wonderful and exciting thing that can happen to someone from Grinnell,” Renfrow Smith said. “Usually when they name someone, the person has been dead. But look, I’m still alive and I can enjoy what’s going to happen.”

Born in 1914, weeks before the start of World War I, Renfrow Smith is a living link in Grinnell’s history, with a family descended from some of the city’s first black residents. According to the Drake Community Library online historical archives, his grandfather was a runaway slave from Missouri who came to Grinnell in 1859 via the Underground Railroad. Her grandmother was also born into slavery, sent north from her home in South Carolina when she was a child by her father, a plantation owner, who wanted to ensure her freedom.

Renfrow Smith, the fifth of six children born to Lee and Eva Pearl Renfrow, attended local public schools. the family were members of a church with many parishioners from the university, attended university events, hosted young black men who were enrolled in the university, and had relatives who mainly worked in service roles there.

Renfrow Smith’s mother was an advocate of education, and all children were expected to earn college degrees. Although three of her older siblings attended historically black colleges, Renfrow Smith was always determined to go to Grinnell.

He majored in psychology with a minor in economics, graduating in 1937.

Throughout her four years of undergrad in the midst of the Great Depression, she was the only black student on campus and lived at home to save money. It wasn’t easy, and she said that even in the 1970s, when she received a book a resident had written about Grinnell’s history, she paid little attention to the influence of the city’s black residents.

“It was like we didn’t even exist in this city,” he said.

Now, domestic students of color make up 26% of Grinnell’s student body, according to the university website.

“The image of black students has changed a lot over the years,” Renfrow Smith said.

Despite the barriers, she was active in the life of the university community, backed by her mother’s insistence that her sons view themselves with the utmost respect for themselves.

“Mrs. Renfrow Smith’s mother was a person who told her children every day, ‘No one is better than you,’ that you are special, that there is something you have to do in the world. To me, this is what It is at the heart of Edith Renfrow Smith’s success and the success of her family, to have this woman who strongly believed in her children and equipped them to reject all the negative images they would encounter as black children in a white community,” said Dr. Tamara Beauboeuf-Lafontant, professor of gender, women’s, and sexuality studies at Grinnell College.

After graduation, Renfrow Smith moved to Chicago, married, and raised two daughters. In 1954, she began working as a public school teacher. After her retirement in 1976, she spent some 40 years volunteering at Goodwill and the Art Institute of Chicago, and was inducted into the Chicago Senior Citizens Hall of Fame in 2009.

He is credited with influencing a Chicago resident, the now world famous jazz musician Herbie Hancockto attend Grinnell, from which he graduated in 1960.

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Naming the new Civic Engagement Quad for her isn’t the first honor she’s received from Grinnell. In 2007, at her 70th class reunion, the Smith Gallery, an art exhibition space in the Joe Rosenfield Center, was named after her. And in 2019, Grinnell College established the Edith Renfrow Smith Black Women’s Library at the Conney M. Kimbo Black Cultural Center.

Also in 2019, he was awarded an honorary doctorate by Renfrow Smith by the university at its graduation ceremony.

The Civic Engagement Quad will be an off-campus dormitory in downtown Grinnell. Initial designs include 24 apartments and a first-floor pavilion dedicated to dialogue and civic engagement, which will be open to the public.

The building, scheduled to open in the fall of 2024, unites the campus and the city, just as Renfrow Smith did nearly nine decades ago.

“This effort requires determination and optimism. It requires a commitment of civic trust. It requires a bit of risk,” said Grinnell College President Anne Harris. “When we think of the Grinnellians whose lives and accomplishments embody these values and who have served as a positive and fearless inspiration to others, it quickly became clear that Edith Renfrow Smith It was that student. Since Renfrow Hall will reside in a space connecting the town of Grinnell and the university, she will be named after the true Grinnellian.”