Kathy Ward learned how to fish at about the same time she learned how to identify segregation.

Ward is a professor of sociology at SIUC whose childhood perceptions paved the way for her life’s work. Her life’s work as a civil rights activist and feminist began along a river bank in Oklahoma where black families would congregate to catch a meal.

Just starting her elementary education, Ward observed an absence of black families within her school. They attended a separate school across the river.

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Ward asked her mother why the black families failed to visit the halls and rooms of her comfortable school.

My mom told me that they went to a school on the other side of the river, Ward recalled. That’s about all she said.

Forty years later, Ward is now piecing together minute details of the race riots that occurred in Cairo in the 1960s. Her work is a testament to her experiences and accomplishments in equal rights.

Ward savors historical research as an opportunity to partially quench her eternal thirst for a chance to reveal the ugly truths of race and gender discrimination.

While the beastly face of racism had etched its expression into Ward’s young mind, her need to understand gender bias in America flourished. She learned more about black identity and the basic principles of feminism when she lived in Kansas.

Ward said when her family moved to Russell, Kan., in 1963 the town was predominately all-white. The stacked ethnic structure of Russell complicated Ward’s quest for the obvious answer to her question of why blacks didn’t mingle with whites much.

It was during Ward’s high school years on the debate team when she became more acutely aware of society’s integration of anti-feminist sentiments and racist thoughts.

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A Russell high school football coach taught one of Ward’s classes. Ward remembered him as a dominant white male.

Ward violently opposed a question the coach placed on an examination:What is the worst amendment added to the Constitution?

The answer:The 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote.

Ward made no response on the examination.

She argued with the coach and took a loss of exam points for refusing to answer the question. This happened in the early ’70s when Martin Luther King had been assassinated and the struggles of civil rights activists were magnified across the nation.

As early as seventh grade, Ward was disciplined for aggressive and sometimes unpopular opinions. She attempted to organize an anti-Vietnam war group comprised of her Sunday school peers.

Ward joined her high school debate team with her long-time friend Teressa Murphy who had impulsively caught onto the civil rights movement while Ward struggled to understand the fundamental concepts of a movement which did not directly involve her.

Ward lived near Teressa’s family which facilitated her interaction with black culture. Ward did have some difficulty obtaining literature documenting civil rights ideologies.

Getting reading material was tough back then, Ward said while displaying an early edition of the magazine, Sisterhood is Powerful, in her Faner Hall office. In high school, Ward started to understand civil rights by reading Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice.

In 1974 while at Hays State University in Kansas, Ward noticed that few African-Americans attended the university. Most black students lived in rooms in the football stadium rather than the dorms, and Ward said the few African-American women who lived in her dorm became tremendously lonely and left for home.

In her second year at the university, Ward organized an International Women’s Year conference and invited black feminist Flo Kennedy. Ward was scolded by the dean of women for Kennedy’s radical speaking style and use of curse words.

Flo had said that no women have shed blood like black women have for civil rights, Ward said. She was saying that white women only shed blood during menstruation.

Ward later attended graduate school at University of Iowa in 1977 before arriving taking her first job at SIUC in 1982.

In the early 1980s, Illinois was a hotbed of political activity regarding the Equal Rights Amendment with issues of women’s rights and anti-women’s rights sentiment ebbing and flowing in the same general directions.

When Ward became SIUC’s Women’s Studies coordinator in 1989 she worked to improve the curriculum, making it more inclusive of race, class and gender issues.

Aside from writing for magazines and other publications, Ward picked up the detective work of SIUC instructor Jan Roddy’s efforts to document the events of the Cairo race riots. Roddy’s book, titled Let My People Go, is a photo journal of the events.

Like many racially diverse towns in the Southern states, Cairo was a place where a black educator might earn only a fraction of what a white counterpart might earn or a lynching might go unpunished.

One of Ward’s biggest challenges was interviewing the lawyers and judges who presided over the countless civil rights cases that originated in Cairo.

The lawyers at the time had been working to reaffirm justice, Ward said.

Three areas of law prevailed more than any others in the monumental Cairo decisions:constitutional bans, challenging segregation in housing and employment, and the voting system.

Ward desires to compile her five years of interviews and observations into an interactive CD-ROM and catalog information in a book, tentatively titled It Ain’t Got Here Yet.

The idea for the book came from one Cairo woman’s comments against white dominance of Cairo’s political, economic and social structures.

Ward recalled the elderly woman’s comments in 1966 just before a civil rights hearing in Cairo.

Rosie Bryant said, Listen, I don’t see a bit of difference now that I did way back on in 1951 or 1952 in the civil rights. It hasn’t reached us yet. It ain’t got to us, not the civil rights.