The Upside

Purdue University Ph.D. Student is The Food Truck Scholar

Ariel D. Smith, Founder, The Food Truck Scholar, at an unspecified event

​Ariel D. Smith is a Black woman on a mission to live her best life. In 2017, she enrolled at Purdue University, in West Lafayette, Indiana, to pursue her Ph.D. in American Studies. The Birmingham, Alabama native sounds like a proud mother when she talks about her southern roots. As soon as she speaks, her accent transports you deep into the south. “Alabama all day,” she says, as if she works for the state’s tourism board. 
 
Blacks make up less than four percent of the nearly 57,000 people in West Lafayette. The city is 65 miles northwest of the state capital in Indianapolis and 113 miles southeast of Chicago. In contrast, Birmingham is Alabama’s second-largest city, after Huntsville, with over 206,000 residents. It is where Martin Luther King Jr. wrote his famous “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” advocating for civil rights through nonviolent means, on April 16, 1963. Blacks are 70 percent of the city’s population.

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