In the 80s, a young mother with no medical training or resources looked after scores of ostracised patients – and the Ku Klux Klan burned crosses on her lawn. Now she is paying tribute to the lost
Ruth Coker Burks has never been an obedient person. When she was visiting a friend in hospital and noticed a nearby door covered in red tarpaulin, the word “biohazard” stamped across it, she lingered. She watched the nurses draw straws, or toothpicks, to decide who would enter the room; then she watched them all walk away. In that moment, she knew: “I was going in there.”
The man in the room was so thin and white that he could barely be seen against the bedsheets. “I asked him if I could help,” Coker Burks says. “He wanted his mother. I thought: ‘Oh, OK, well that’s great. I can do that. Then I’ve done my good deed.’”
