Carolina Quotes
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.
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
“I guess I came back having seen that you can walk around fre…” Ruth Dial Woods. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-A88F0CD631. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/a88f0cd631
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.
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.
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.