What an Elder Changes

I’m already rich. I got everything I need, everything I want. I’m already rich.

Before Charles Simmons became a journalist, professor, organizer, and keeper of Detroit history, he learned leadership by watching older people act. He is known across Detroit as Baba Charles. But in this interview, recorded in 2026, he begins by explaining that the name is not a simple label. It is a social contract.

The title Baba is heard all over Africa. It’s an honor. It is one of the words for “father,” and it can mean “elder.” He says it is not a self-assumed title; young people and the community place it on a person based on the relationship they have built and the work they have done.

The title reaches backward, across family and community. In earlier public interviews, Simmons recalled being born in River Rouge in 1941 and being raised largely by his grandparents in Detroit. Their house was a place where history lived in the daily rules.

I grew up with my grandparents. They were community leaders. My granddad was a big follower of Marcus Garvey. My grandmother’s father was mayor of Amherstburg in Canada, and her grandfather was one of the founders of Amherstburg.

One memory turns that inheritance into a scene. As a teenager, Simmons was placed in a trade curriculum. He remembers horseplay in an electrical shop, a white teacher’s insult, and his sudden determination to prove that the school’s judgment did not belong to him. He asked to enter college preparation. A counselor said no. Then he went home and told his grandmother.

Simmons recalls being placed in trade school, going to electrical shop class, and confronting a teacher who used a racial slur. He decided to enter the college-preparatory curriculum. When a counselor refused the transfer, he went home and told his grandmother. The next day she dressed carefully, went to school with him, and asked to see the principal. When told the principal was busy, she asked for the superintendent. After meeting with the superintendent, she came out and Simmons was placed in college prep.

Simmons does not remember what his grandmother said inside that meeting. He remembers the hat. He remembers the superintendent. And he remembers the result: when she came out, he was in college prep. That single intervention reshaped the entire path of his life.

Years later, after military service, movement organizing, international reporting, university classrooms, and the creation of Hush House with Sandra Simmons, Baba Charles described wealth in the same terms he learned in his grandparents’ home: not as something you accumulate, but as something you inherit and pass on.

Simmons describes himself as rich because of his wife, children, grandchildren, home, education, knowledge, health, community, and the relationships and experiences gathered over a lifetime. He says those are the things that make him wealthy—and that he can pass to other people.

[“Blueprint on Dexter,” the DGC Empowerment Hour closing theme, plays through the end of the episode.]