CPTnet
September 15, 2003
CHICAGO/TORONTO: Peacemaker Congress speaker has brush with death at early
age

CPT's upcoming Peacemaker Congress will bring together peace veterans, some
of whom have faced death in their work of justice and nonviolence.
Registrations are still being accepted.
http://www.cpt.org/congress/cpt_congress.php

Civil rights veteran Ruby Nell Sales, a plenary speaker at the Peacemaker
Congress, has had just such a brush with death. As a voter registration
activist during the Freedom Movement's civil rights period, Sales was jailed
in Haneyville, Alabama.

When she and her group were released from prison, no-one was there to meet
them. Hot and thirsty, the group went into a "little store on the corner, a
store that we had gone in many times" to buy drinks. As they stood in line,
Sales recounts, suddenly there was "Tom Coleman, standing there with a
shotgun, threatening, 'Bitch, I'll blow your brains out,' because I was in
front and Jonathan was behind me. Things happened so fast. There was a pull
and I fell back. The next thing, there was a shotgun blast . . . " Her
friend Jonathan Daniels, a white seminarian, was killed. Traumatized,
Sales says the murder "rendered me mute. I did not speak significantly for
seven months. I could not speak."

When Coleman stood trial, Sales "was determined that I would go to the trial
although my parents' lives had been threatened." At seventeen years old,
she was determined to testify. "It was a hard moment in my life. But I
knew that somehow, I was going to speak up for Jonathan because he was dead
and
couldn't speak up for himself."

Today Ruby Nell Sales continues to testify with wisdom and elegance. She is
a highly trained, experienced, and deeply committed social activist,
scholar, administrator, preacher and educator in the areas of Civil, Gender
and Human Rights. She is Director of Spirit House in Washington, DC, which
she founded in 2000 for the purpose of building a just and nonviolent world
though the arts, spiritual reflection, and attention to public policy.

Sales is one of the featured plenary and resource people for CPT's upcoming
Peacemaker Congress VII - "Uniting the Races for Homeland Security and World
Peace," September 25-28 at John Knox Presbyterian church in Youngstown, OH.
She will speak September 26, Friday night, on "Moving From Fragmentation to
Community."

Other Congress plenary speakers include nonviolence expert Bernard
Lafayette, Jr. speaking on "Organizing Nonviolent Struggle in an Era of
Neocolonialism" and CPTer Lisa Martens, part of CPT's Iraq project in
Baghdad during the war, speaking on "What Iraq Teaches Peacemakers."

Register today! Contact Mark Frey at CPT at 773 277-0253 or email
markefrey#cpt.org. Full information available at:
http://www.cpt.org/congress/cpt_congress.php