Ruth Coker Burks

Frances Ruth Coker Burks is a former caregiver of AIDS crisis victims and an AIDS awareness advocate based in Arkansas. During the onslaught of the AIDS epidemic in the late 1980s, she used her salary as a real estate agent to care for AIDS patients whose families and communities had abandoned them. Because of the prejudices, fears, and stigma surrounding the disease at the time, she was often the patients' only caregiver until they eventually died. She is recognized for burying them in her own family cemetery in Hot Springs, Arkansas. She currently lives in Rogers, Arkansas.