Ruby Sales: How Do We Maintain Our Courage To Fight For Change?

At 17, Ruby Sales witnessed the shooting of one of her fellow civil rights activists. She explains how despite the trauma, she went on to devote her life to fighting for social and racial justice.

Ruby Sales is the founder and director of the Spirit House Project, a non-profit that works towards racial, economic, and social justice.

As a teenager at Tuskegee University in the 1960s, she joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and went to work as a student freedom fighter in Lowndes County, Alabama.

Her story is featured as part of an oral history project in the new Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C.

A social activist, scholar, public theologian, and educator, Sales has preached around the country on race, class, gender and reconciliation.

Sales has degrees from Tuskegee Institute, Manhattanville College, and Princeton University. She also received a Masters of Divinity from the Episcopal Divinity School