Carolina Quotes
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.
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
“She was buying a gift for someone and I said "Could we have …” Ruth Dial Woods. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-B3BA4CFE9C. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/b3ba4cfe9c
More from Ruth Dial Woods
[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.
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 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.