Ruth Dial Woods

North Carolina · born or raised South Carolina · connected1938–2023

American educator and activist

Born in Robeson County
Studied at Meredith College
Studied at University of North Carolina at Pembroke
Studied at South Carolina State University
Studied at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Worked at Fayetteville State University

Quotations with a citation

I'm not worried about my identity because I know who I am and what I am. And they can't take that away from me by federal recognition or without it.

It was a time of hope. It was a time of hope, I think. Blacks, whites, poor whites, Indians, anyone who really had a mutual mission of equality, what it provided to us was hope.

I came through the era when we had the separate restrooms for whites, blacks, and Indians in all the stores in Lumberton, when you had separate seating arrangements in the movie theaters for whites, blacks, and Indians, when you had the separate water fountains.

I think we've been kind enough for a hundred years and I think it's time now to just sue the federal government and take all this money that we spent on federal recognition and put it in law suits if nothing more than to document the ineffectiveness and the inefficiency and the unwillingness of the federal government to face up to its responsibilities.

So you see, my message is that you can't take the person's identity away from them. That's yours. Nobody can stamp approval on it and nobody can take it away.

[T]here's been so many days in my life that I had to stop and question "Am I a dreamer or is it real or what is it?" and I guess from early on I must have been a dreamer and looked and saw that things should move and there was things to be understood and things to be explored and things to be discovered.

I was grounded in my early childhood by my grandmother at whose apron strings I learned the difference between right and wrong and followed her to the farm to milk the cow.

She was buying a gift for someone and I said "Could we have a box?" and the clerk says "We don't have any boxes." And I said to my mother, "Well why don't you just leave it and we'll go somewhere else where we can get a box?" My momma says "No, that's alright. We'll get it." I says "No. Leave it." because it happened to be a season that you knew darn well they had boxes in the store but because my mother was Indian or because we were Indian they weren't going to give her a box.

I guess I came back having seen that you can walk around freely and that there are other opportunities and advantages and when I came back and saw that people were still subjected to this kind of humiliation and indignity, I became more radical about trying to encourage and challenge the system and to become more vocal.