Carolina Quotes
[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.
Ruth Dial Woods Carolinian
Source
Oral history interview, June 12, 1992, Interview L-0078, Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007), University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
- form
- interview
- work
- Oral History Interview with Ruth Dial Woods
- year
- 1992
Cite this record
“there's been so many days in my life that I had to stop and …” Ruth Dial Woods. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-6C40130340. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/6c40130340
More from Ruth Dial Woods
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.
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.