The Language of Liberation: A Conversation with Ruby Sales

Abstract

The Language of Liberation: A Conversation with Ruby Sales Kim Pearson (bio) and Angelle Richardson (bio) Introduction When Ruby Sales was a graduate student in history at Princeton University in the 1970s, she said she “stayed in trouble.” “I was not going to debate whether or not Black people were human beings,” Sales recalled. She clashed with professors who expected her to refer to enslavers as “masters” and “planters” (“As if they planted anything!” she said). When her professors referred to plantations, she insisted on referring to “sites of terror.” “The minute I say ‘Master,’ I’m aggrandizing what they did,” she said, adding, “The language itself causes Black people to commit existential suicide.” Ruby Sales has been thinking about the language of liberation for many years now. If you look up her name, you will likely come across this episode: In August 1965, as a seventeen-year-old first-semester college student, along with other members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), she was jailed for six days for helping Black sharecroppers in Lowndes County, Alabama, protest exploitation by local landowners. After being released from jail, she and three other volunteers went to a store in Hayneville to buy sodas. A white man stood on the steps, raised a shotgun, and shot at Ruby. Jonathan Myrick Daniels, a twenty-six-year-old seminarian, pushed Ruby aside and took the fatal bullet instead.1 Another member of the group was badly wounded. The murderer, a part-time sheriff, was acquitted of manslaughter.2 From that time until today, Ruby Sales has honored Daniels’s memory. She spoke about him in her 2018 TED talk, “How We Can Start to Heal the Pain of Racial Division.” However, her life has been much more than one horrific moment. As she told me and my co-interviewer Angelle Richardson, when we think about our individual and collective trauma, we should simultaneously think about “the ways in which [we] have navigated the trauma, so that we don’t become the trauma that we have experienced.” In our interview, Sales explains how the parents and teachers of her Jim Crow childhood instilled a “pedagogy of somebodyness” that propelled her life’s work and her ability to persevere in the face of white supremacist terror. She complemented that early education with a history degree from Manhattanville College and a MDiv from Episcopal Seminary. Through her nonprofit organization, the Spirit House Project, Sales has been convening conversations and collaborations aimed at bringing the practical wisdom of the Southern Freedom movement to bear upon the current challenges of what the World Economic Forum calls “the fourth industrial revolution,” characterized by the blending of the “physical, digital and biological worlds in ways that create huge promise and potential peril.”3 She wants to see more focus on how we confront the real and potential perils of this transformation for Black people. [End Page 19] We spoke to Ms. Sales in February 2022. What follows are a few excerpts of that conversation, along with resources for further exploration of the topics broached in our discussion. Kim Pearson: A few days ago, you published a post on Facebook paying tribute to Mrs. Catherine Shores, whom you described as one of your beloved high school teachers. You called the roll of several teachers, along with your parents, and you credited them with creating “a community filled with love and generosity, coupled with a spirit and pedagogy of somebodyness.” Tell us about what Mrs. Shores and her colleagues did for you. Ruby Sales: Mrs. Shores and the other teachers who I named in that post are part of a community project that went all the way back to about 1866, when Black men who were the first generation from the community of enslaved Africans met in Selma, Alabama, where they endeavored to educate the youth for the advancement of the race, and preservation of our rights and liberties. And that became the community project throughout the South. Education was seen as a springboard to liberation. They were race men and women. The advancement of the race was inextricably tied into their own personal ambitions, or how they saw themselves. So we grew...