BY KERA ABRAHAM
Healing Our Wounds
A local activist considers the civil rights movement,
white priviledge and reperations.
Ruth Koenig grew up in Scotia, New York and came to Eugene in 1966. Now retired, she
has worked in Eugene as a teacher, community education coordinator and developer of
the Eugene Stream Team. She is involved with a variety of local organizations, including
Central Presbyterian Church and a range of community health, environmental and multi-
cultural groups.
What’s your history with the civil
rights movement?
The critical point for me was the
Birmingham bombing of September ’63,
when four little girls died because someone
put a bomb in their church. I thought, How
can someone willfully do that? That’s what
propelled me to join the Mississippi Freedom
Summer in July of ’64, when I was 23. It
wasn’t that I thought I was going to make a
difference or be in any kind of leadership po-
sition. I just wanted to understand better and
help in any way I could.
What happened during the Mississippi
Freedom Summer?
Young black folks were the organizers,
and there were three prongs to their idea:
Freedom Schools to help kids of color
understand their history and culture, voter
registration drives and community centers. It
was really questionable as to whether or not
they were going to encourage whites to partic-
ipate in this massive effort at voter registra-
tion. They made the decision to bring whites
in because they felt that until and unless
Northern whites truly understood what was
going on in the South, they couldn’t expect
substantial change.
There’s something to be said for
reaching out to people who wouldn’t
necessarily care about injustice until
it touches their lives directly.
Exactly. That’s where we get to repara-
tions. When will we ever acknowledge what
we did in Vietnam? Ask how many people
died in Vietnam and people will go “Uh,
58,000.” Americans. How many people died?
Several million. And children are still being
born with brains outside their skulls because
of what we did there.
Was there complete solidarity be-
tween the whites and blacks involved
in Freedom Summer, or was it tense?
The only people we could trust that sum-
mer were local
black people. Any
time I’ve talked
about the Freedom
Summer, I’ve said
that white people
think it’s a really
neat thing that we
did. But the people
who took the great-
est risk were those
black folks in
Mississippi who
were risking their
lives all the time.
They were shot at,
arrested, beaten. If
they rented a place,
they could be kicked out. If they owned a
place, it could be burned down. If they had a
job, they could lose it. And they could be
killed. But when you stood with other people
involved in this project, and you crossed arms
and stood in stifling heat with everyone per-
spiring profusely, and you sang “We Shall
Overcome,” there was something there that
was far greater than the individuals involved,
and I never quite felt that way again.
How does your faith play into your
commitment to civil rights?
When I was a very little child in Sunday
school, an image was presented to me of the
life of Christ and what that meant: that people
should be with and for one another through-
out the world. That faith has driven my work
for social justice in the United States,
Nicaragua and South Africa.
What are your hopes and concerns for
the social justice movement today?
Every age calls for examination and dis-
cernment. Today, we’re talking about repara-
tions. How does healing happen? If you have
a wound that heals over with an infection in
there, that infection will probably get worse.
There has to be some way in which we ac-
knowledge our history and lay it open, some
concrete form of apology, and then some sort
of reparation. An apology alone can be a hol-
low thing, and it
doesn’t address all
of the problems that
have occurred in the
wake of history.
and mutilated the African American folks.
Seventy years later, reparations were paid to
victims still living and relatives of those
killed.
What are some non-monetary forms
of reparations?
I’ve read about reparations to provide ac-
cess to educational, cultural and economic
opportunities, health care services and loans
for housing, land and preservation of sacred
sites. Reparations might also include ac-
knowledgments, apologies and “truth and
reconciliation” sessions. Some local activi-
ties are interesting examples. At Lane
Community College there is a program,
“Rites of Passage Summer Academy,” for
African American, Asian American, Latino
and Native American students in grades 6
through 12. The various culture clubs offered
within schools, local cultural centers and fes-
tivals could receive support through repara-
tions. Another local example is the Northwest
I f yo u ha v e a w o un d t ha t he al s ov er w i t h a n
in f ec t i on i n t h e re , t ha t i nf e c ti o n w il l pr ob a b l y
ge t w o r se . Th er e ha s t o b e s om e w a y i n wh i ch
w e ac k n ow l ed ge ou r hi s t or y an d l ay i t op e n.
What kinds of
reparations do
you envision?
I wouldn’t be the
person to have that
vision, but I can tell you what I’ve read and
heard. I know there are folks who feel that
money should be given to individuals. In
1988, Congress gave Japanese Americans
who were interned during World War II
$20,000 each. How do you ever say that that
compensated people for what was taken from
them, whether it was their homes, businesses
or dignity? With regard to the African
American community, if you want to see
some truth about our history, watch the film
Rosewood. It’s about a massacre in Florida in
1923. A white woman accused a black man of
rape, and the white population of that small
community just erupted and burned and hung
Indian Language Institute, based in Eugene.
It seems particularly appropriate that govern-
ment funds be provided for this, since it was
government policies that took Native chil-
dren from their families and forbade the use
of Native languages in the boarding schools.
It seems to me that if the U.S. gov-
ernment were to offer reparations, it
would have to offer them to just
about every citizen of color in the na-
tion. Would that be possible, given
the current debt and the money we’re
pouring into bombs?
That’s exactly where I’d go. If we have
money to go to the moon, if we have money
to go and kill hundreds of thousands of peo-
ple in Iraq, but we don’t have money to right
the wrongs of our history, what do we stand
for as a people?
ew
OCTOBER 6, 2005 13