When Ruby Sales declared that "The movement saved my life," she was expressing a truth that became a testimony for many of the Veterans of Hope, especially those who had entered the southern freedom movement as teenagers or young adults. Their courageous participation in an extraordinary social movement that transformed a people, a region and a nation opened an awesome set of possibilities and directions for their own lives. It provided a cross-generational fellowship of hope and commitment that they never forgot. Certainly, this was the case for the thoughtful, articulate black woman who grew up in Columbus, Georgia, the daughter of Reverend Joseph Sales and Mrs. Willie Mae Sales.

Born in 1948, Ruby Sales was nurtured in a small town African American community which organized its life around its strongest institutions -- family, church and school. When Ruby graduated from high school, she was encouraged to attend Tuskegee University in Alabama -- originally founded by Booker T. Washington as Tuskegee Institute. By the time Ruby entered the school in the fall of 1963, Tuskegee had begun to experience the challenge and energy of the freedom movement as it rose across the state and all through the south.

At Tuskegee, Ruby met the Movement most directly through the audacious young community organizers of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, or "Snick"). By the fall of 1964 with the support of one of her favorite professors, Sales had joined the SNCC forces, moving regularly between the campus and nearby Lowndes County, where a voter registration project was focused. There she also met some of the remarkable local community people who adopted "the children" of SNCC as their leaders and wards. (At age sixteen, Ruby Sales was both child and leader in the Lowndes County freedom movement.)

Working in this context, Ruby Sales came very close to losing her life, and yet too, it was saved in more ways than one. Following the momentous winter of the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery march, Ruby became even more deeply involved in Lowndes County (Selma was the county seat). For many decades, the white supremacist power structure had used terrorism, legal manipulations and fierce economic coercion to brutally deny black citizens their right to democratic participation. By the mid-1960s, in a situation where that power structure was being persistently challenged, Ruby and co-workers knew that they were courting real dangers, including, possibly, death. (Memory of the murders of civil rights workers, Jimmy Lee Jackson, Viola Liuzzo and James Reeb were still fresh in Alabama in the aftermath of the march. The dynamite from the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham still echoed.)

In August, 1965, Ruby herself faced the terrifying muzzle of a shotgun when a white shopowner in Hayneville, Alabama took aim at her and fired. In the split second it took to push Ruby aside, her friend and co-worker, Jonathan Daniels, took the shot meant for her and fell to his death on the ground. Ruby was so shaken by the events that she didn't speak for many weeks. Determined, nonetheless to be a witness at the trial of the murderer, Ruby defied death threats and allowed the church songs of her childhood to sing strength into her heart. She testified, only to see the assailant acquitted by an all-white jury. (The blatant injustice of the decision became the primary basis for a series of successful challenges to the segregated jury selection system of the South.)

Not long after these experiences, Ruby left the South. But she did not leave the fight for the expansion of democracy. By the end of the 1960s she was in New York City, still working on behalf of the movement, now experiencing all the strange nuances of the north's interpretation of racial democracy. In 1971 she completed her college education at New York's Manhattanville College, a long way from home.

In New York Ruby searched for a focal point for her life that would replace the centering influence that home, church and school had played in her early life and that she had later experienced in the enlivening community of the Movement. For a while, Marxism seemed to provide that centering role, but it could not carry the deep and soulful songs of her childhood, and did not seem able to respond to some of the most urgent emotional cries of people who needed a new life as much as a new analysis. Neither Marxism nor six years of a Princeton University graduate education in history was life-saving, and eventually Ruby found herself listening to the formidable, wisdom-bearing inner voice of Sojourner Truth. During the years at Princeton and immediately afterward, the presence of Sojourner Truth became an increasingly persistent force in Ruby’s inner life, engaging her in soul-level conversations about her purpose and direction, and the many gifts she had to share.

Listening, sharing and searching, Ruby taught for several years at colleges and universities like Spelman College in Atlanta, Bucknell in Pennsylvania and the University of Maryland. While she taught, she remained active in the growing networks of activist women of color. At times she felt a tension between her work in academia and her work in the women’s movement – but she was determined to bring her whole self to whatever she was called to do. Then, Ruby made a major decision. Closely following Sojourner, and her own spirit of hope, she decided to enroll at the theological school which Jonathan Daniels had been attending at the time of his participation in the Movement. From 1994 to 1998 Ruby was a student at the Episcopal Seminary in Cambridge, Massachusetts. There she struggled with the meaning of her calling as a woman, as a Christian, as a prophet of hope and as a child of the freedom movement, still choosing not to be formally ordained.

Early in the year 2000, Ruby Sales became the director of the St. Stephens Community Center in Washington, D.C., a church-based social justice center, where she says she believes she has worked out “the ordination thing” in an informal but very real way. Meanwhile, she continues to envision the organizing of a “Women of All Colors” movement, partly in response to Sojourner’s call, partly in response to all the sisters she has met on her own journey, and partly in continuing quest for faithfulness to the community and the movement that saved (and still saves) her life.

Ruby is currently founder and director of SpiritHouse, a national organization that combines research, the arts, education, spiritual reflection and community-building to unite diverse people in work toward a just a nonviolent world.

Vincent Harding
Co-Chairperson, Veterans of Hope Project
July 2000