Ruby Doris Smith-Robinson, one of the unsung champions of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, was the only woman to serve as Executive Secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and was known for her verve and willingness to take on anything or anyone.
Kwame Ture (fka Stokely Carmichael, one of the original SNCC Freedom Riders) once said of Ruby, “She was convinced that there was nothing that she could not do… she was a tower of strength.”
Ruby was arrested several times and served 100 days in prison, voluntarily adopting SNCC’s “Jail-no-Bail” strategy to keep bail money from further funding racist police departments.
Ruby participated in multiple sit-ins in Atlanta as part of the Atlanta Student Movement while she attended Spelman College, joined the Freedom Riders, was attacked and beaten in Montgomery, and in Atlanta worked to integrate hospitals after lunch counters were successfully desegregated.
At one hospital demonstration, the receptionist told Ruby and her fellow protestors to leave when they came through the white hospital entrance. “Besides you’re not sick anyway,” the receptionist added. Ruby walked right up to the desk, looked the receptionist in the eye, then vomited on the counter and retorted, “Is that sick enough for you?”
Former SNCC leader and NAACP Chairman Julian Bond remembered that when SNCC staff was preparing to board a plane for Africa in 1964 to observe the success of the nonviolence technique, an airline representative told them the plane was overbooked, they were being bumped and would have to take a later flight. This angered Smith-Robinson so much that without consulting the rest of the group she went and sat down in the jetway and refused to move. (They were given seats on the original flight.)
Smith-Robinson also created the Sojourner Truth Motor Fleet for SNCC to make sure the field staff always had cars available.
Only one year after Ruby succeeded James Forman as SNCC’s Executive Secretary, she died from cancer at 25 – a devastating loss to her movement colleagues and SNCC itself. On the headstone at her Atlanta grave site are words appropriate for both her life and SNCC: “If you think free, you are free.”
In 2017, Smith-Robinson’s niece Keisha Lance Bottoms was elected Mayor of Atlanta.
To learn more about Ruby, check out her biography Soon We Will Not Cry: The Liberation of Ruby Doris Smith-Robinson (2000) by Cynthia Griggs Fleming or SNCC’s digital profile on her at: https://snccdigital.org/people/ruby-doris-smith-robinson/
*[This year marks the 100th anniversary since Dr. Carter G. Woodson founded Negro History Week in February 1926. Fifty years after that, President Gerald Ford officially recognized Black History Month. In 1986, Congress passed a law designating February as Black History Month across the U.S.]
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