My mom had always wanted me to better myself. I wanted to better myself because of her. Now when the strikes started, I told her I was going to join … - Studs Terkel

Ruby Bates, one of the young white girls, was a remarkable person. She told me she had been driven into prostitution when she was thirteen. She had been working in a textile mill for a pittance. When she asked for a raise, the boss told her to make it up by going with the workers. She told me there was nothing else she could do...Ruby Bates was a remarkable woman. Underneath it all — the poverty, the degradation — she was decent, pure. Here was an illiterate white girl, all of whose training had been clouded by the myths of white supremacy, who, in the struggle for the lives of these nine innocent boys, had come to see the role she was being forced to play. As a murderer. She turned against her oppressors. . .. I shall never forget her.

They would sit and talk and tell us their hard luck story. Whether it was true or not, we never questioned it. It’s very important you learn people as people are.

Curiosity never killed this cat’ — that’s what I’d like as my epitaph