Early work with the civil rights movement and conditions of discrimination
Woods describes her initial involvement in the civil rights movement, which she argues was "multiracial." In addition, Woods elaborates more about the kinds of segregation that African Americans and Indians faced in the South, focusing specifically on her experiences in North Carolina where three-way segregation was common.
Citing this Excerpt
Oral History Interview with Ruth Dial Woods, June 12, 1992. Interview L-0078. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Full Text of the Excerpt
- ANNE MITCHELL COE:
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Were these civil rights activities mostly involving Indians?
- RUTH DIAL WOODS:
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No, we were multiracial. I remember when the custodial and service
workers in Durham were marching for higher wages, I was six months
pregnant wanting to march and they wouldn't let me march and
I cried.
- ANNE MITCHELL COE:
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Were you involved in leadership roles in these things?
- RUTH DIAL WOODS:
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No, not really. It was just that wherever you were needed you got up and
went. 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 regret to say that I
don't sense that hope out there now at all.
- LAURA MOORE:
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Were there specific deprivations or discriminations regarding Indians
that you noticed more when you came back from Michigan that you were
particularly concerned about when you were involved in the civil rights
movement?
- RUTH DIAL WOODS:
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I didn't have to go to Michigan to notice them. As I told
you, I came up in all Indian schools. 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.
- LAURA MOORE:
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How would that work?
- RUTH DIAL WOODS:
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Oh you just had three of everything with a sign to it.
- ANNE MITCHELL COE:
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How would a theater be arranged? What would it look like?
- RUTH DIAL WOODS:
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Downstairs you would seat all the white customers. Upstairs you would
have one section for blacks and one section for Indians. 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. I guess it was just a natural that the civil
rights became my way to really put those things into motion and into
action. As I said, when that started leveling off and we realized we
hadn't saved the world, then it was time to move to something
else and then there was the women's movement and, of course,
after the women's movement we had the Decade of the Indian
which was the 70's to the 80's and then the
80's to the 90's has been the Decade of the
Hispanic and I've reached the point now that when I write
that book I'll be able to do a lot of talking about political
appeasement and about the level of commitment - that there is no
commitment. It's only response to whatever is politically
feasible at the moment in order to govern, to control, and to subject.
- ANNE MITCHELL COE:
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Does that relate to you saying that you don't see the same
hope that you did in the sixties now?
- RUTH DIAL WOODS:
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Definitely. There was no intent ever to empower all people in this
country or to work toward shared power or to even try to support shared
power. It's real interesting how this country looks to Japan
and talks about what happens in Japan, but the reason Japan has now
surpassed the United States is because Japan builds upon its culture
into all of its decisions whether it be education, whether it be the
family, whether it be the work place, and that has been researched and
written by a fellow by the name of Oucci who writes about how you
consider the culture of the family and that work is related to family
and folks bring their values of family into the work place and because
it's that mutual culture and collaboration and that sharing
which transcends from the regular culture. You see, this country is not
interested in looking at any culture except the supreme closed culture
that's not even a western civilization culture. It is a
culture of control and power and greed, the same kind of greed that
brought European immigrants here to seek their freedom and now
it's a greed and a power that we will control and we will do
anything that we have to in order to begin to control.
- ANNE MITCHELL COE:
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So then, when you look back on the civil rights movement and on the
women's movement and all of these things, do you feel that it
was a wasted effort? How do you view those now that you're
the other side of them?
- RUTH DIAL WOODS:
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Certainly not a wasted effort because it made me who I am today and it
gave me the opportunity and the experiences to make the statements with
conviction that I just made because I've been there and
I've been around long enough to go through these different
movements and to be in different places at different times and at
different levels. I do not think that I speak with
bias, with some of the same pangs intact of the discrimination from the
child into an adult and some of the same discrimination that exist now,
but exposed enough to structures and policy-making, and government to
know how government functions and why it functions as it does which is
certainly not for the good of the people.