Ruth Coker Burks

Frances Ruth Coker Burks (born March 19, 1959), also known as the Cemetery Angel, is a former carer of AIDS crisis patients and an AIDS awareness advocate based in Arkansas. During 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. Due to the stigma surrounding the disease at the time, she was often the patients' only carer until they eventually died. She is additionally recognized for burying a number of AIDS victims in Hot Springs, Arkansas.

Early life Named after her grandmother, Burks was born in Hot Springs, Arkansas, and was friends with Bill Clinton growing up. Raised in a Methodist family, her mother Aline (née Lawler) was hospitalized with tuberculosis for a prolonged period during her childhood, during which Burks' father was her primary caretaker until his death when she was 5. After this, Burks was raised by her mother in an abusive household, including periods where she was placed into orphanages.

Burks's family members have been buried in Files Cemetery in Hot Springs since the late 19th century. According to Burks, her mother eventually purchased all 262 plots left in the cemetery after an argument with Burks's uncle to ensure that he and his family would not be buried there. Later, Burks's mother left her the land, which she would go on to use to bury some of her patients. Burks married and had a child before divorcing, raising her daughter Alison as a single parent.

AIDS advocacy Burks' first interaction with an AIDS patient occurred in 1984, when she was visiting a friend who was receiving treatment for cancer at a hospital in Little Rock, Arkansas. Burks noticed that nurses were afraid to go into a room belonging to a patient diagnosed with what had until August 1982 been known as Gay-Related Immune Deficiency (GRID).

Burks began to receive regular phone calls, initially from hospitals and later from AIDS patients themselves. In all, she estimates that she contributed to the care of over 1000 people over three decades. Burks says that she, with the assistance of her daughter, buried more than 40 AIDS victims in Files Cemetery in Hot Springs.

Due to her work with AIDS, Burks and her daughter were shunned by their local community, and on two occasions crosses were burned in her yard by the Ku Klux Klan.

Post-AIDS crisis Burks had buried her last AIDS patient by 1995. Subsequently, she moved to Rogers, Arkansas, both in order to be closer to her family, and because health insurance would no longer cover her after her stroke.

Memoir and film Burks' memoir, All the Young Men, co-authored with Kevin Carr O'Leary, was published in 2020, by Grove Press. The book was named as Book of the Day by The Guardian in January 2021.

Controversies Monument fundraising In November 2015, shortly after Burks's story was widely publicized, New Yorker Travis Dubreuil launched a GoFundMe campaign to raise money to build a monument to the men Burks had buried in Files Cemetery, a goal Burks had spoken of in the Arkansas Times article that brought her story to attention. The scope of the fundraiser was later enlarged to also cover some of Burks's medical expenses.