Ruby Sales
*Ruby Sales was born on this date in 1948. She is a Black social justice activist, scholar, and public theologian.
Born Ruby Nell in Jemison, Alabama, she attended locally segregated Carver High School and was educated in the community during the American Civil Rights Movement. After graduating high school, Sales attended Tuskegee Institute, where she became involved in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). During that time, SNCC assigned her to Calhoun County, Alabama. Students in Fort Deposit, a small town in Lowndes County, asked SNCC for its support in a demonstration to protest the local store owner's treatment of their sharecropper parents, and the organization sent members from various counties to join their cause.
Sales was one of the 30 people who participated in the August 14, 1965 demonstration. Many members of that group were arrested and taken to the county seat of Hayneville. After being jailed for six days, the group was released. No advance notice was given so no one could pick the demonstrators up. She and a few others went to a nearby store to get something to drink. There, she and the group were threatened by a shotgun-wielding state highway department employee, Tom Coleman, who was also a volunteer county deputy.
One of her fellow marchers, Jonathan Daniels, a White Episcopal seminarian, pushed her out of the way and took the shot meant for her, dying instantly. Sales was so traumatized by Daniels' murder that she nearly lost the ability to speak for the next seven months. Despite death threats made to her and her family, Sales resolved to testify at Tom Coleman's trial. He was acquitted by a jury of 12 white men and said in a CBS television interview a year after the killings that he had no regrets, declaring, "I would shoot them both tomorrow."
Sales attended Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the successor institution to the seminary Daniels had attended. She has worked as a human rights advocate in Washington, D.C., and the South. She founded the Spirit House Project, a non-profit organization with an inner-city mission dedicated to Daniels. Starting in 2007, the Spirit House Project documented over 2,000 state-sanctioned deaths against Black people. Ninety-eight percent of those counted in that number were unarmed. "It is not by accident that Black Lives Matter is a theme today," said Sales. She believes "Black Lives Matter" has always been a theme of the fight for justice, even in slavery.
At a 2014 conference she organized in Washington, DC, Sales contended that saying "All Lives Matter" as a response to the slogan "Black Lives Matter" is an act that perpetuates White nationalism. The Conference was titled "What's Behind the Wave of Police and Vigilante Killings of Black People?" (April 22, 2014, Washington, DC). Sales and Cheryl Blankenship coordinated the Conference.
