Ruby Doris Smith-Robinson

Smith-Robinson was born in Atlanta, Georgia, United States, on April 25, 1942 and spent her childhood in Atlanta's Summerhill neighborhood. She was the second oldest of seven children born to Alice, a beautician, and J. T. Smith, a furniture mover and Baptist minister. The Smith children lived a comfortable existence in their separate Black world. Their parents made their earnings off of Black patronage rather than from the support of whites, which showed Ruby from a young age the power and independence that Black people could have. They had strong adult support, and they had their own churches, schools, and social activities. No matter how insulated they were, however, the reality of American racism and segregation intruded from time to time. Smith-Robinson recalled her feelings about segregation in those early years saying, "I was conscious of my Blackness. Every young Negro growing up in the South has thoughts about the racial situation." Her sister Catherine remembers that even as an adolescent, Ruby said to her, "I know what my life and mission is…It's to set the Black people free. I will never rest until it happens. I will die for that cause." A specific encounter she had with segregation as a young girl was on a summer day when she and her sister went to the drugstore for an ice cream cone. The clerk used his hands to grab her cone and handed it to her. She replied saying, "I won't be eating that one" because she knew that they used tissues to grab cones for the white customers. ==Atlanta Student Movement==

Young Ruby, like many young Black Americans of her generation, became convinced that change was possible. When she entered Spelman College in 1959, she quickly became involved in the Atlanta Student Movement after being inspired by the Greensboro North Carolina lunch counter sit-in, which prevented blacks from eating at the same lunch counter as white people did during her sophomore year. She participated in many sit-ins and was arrested a few times after getting involved in the Atlanta Student Movement. She regularly picketed and protested with her colleagues in a bid to integrate Atlanta. In the summer of 1960, though many students involved in the Atlanta Student Movement were no longer on campus, Smith-Robinson continued to organize. This included initiating an economic boycott and kneel-ins at whites churches. The slogan she created for the boycott was "have integration will shop, have segregation will not." Even on days when no one else was there to protest, she picketed outside the A&P grocery store alone. ==Involvement in SNCC==

The first SNCC meeting Ruby attended was in February 1961. She previously had avoided the organization since there seemed to be a stronger focus on strategy and planning rather than participating in actual protests. However, at this meeting they talked about the jail-versus-bail issue, specifically in relation to a group of students in Rock Hill arrested for demonstrating yet refusing to post bail. SNCC decided to send a delegation, and Ruby ended up going. The group was arrested and sentenced to 30 days in prison. This was the first time that she took part in civil rights activities outside her immediate community. After Ruby served time in prison for taking part in the Freedom Rides, she was a student conferee at a student leadership seminar taking part in Nashville, Tennessee. Here she raised the issue of attacks within the black community and the need to deal with problems among fraternities and sororities. She noticed that the majority of graduates from the universities that produced the most doctors and lawyers were light-skinned and connected to fraternities. She discovered that this was due to the fact that fraternity brothers were on the admissions committees. The movement's focus needed to be also within the black community. The following year, she argued that blacks must maintain the dominance of the SNCC after the organization had become dependent on whites for financial and political help. She suggested that they recruit southerners and set a limit on how many northerners they accepted since they sometimes caused tension within SNCC. One of her coworkers believed she "had been anti-white for years", although others dispute this since later on in her involvement in SNCC, one of her closest friends was white. She maintained much of the black nationalist agenda without being anti-white. For many years, she was suspected of being the author of the anonymously submitted paper "The Position of Women in SNCC" from the 1964 SNCC staff meeting in Waveland, Mississippi, since credited, principally, to Casey Hayden and Mary King. Smith-Robinson was responsible for providing logistics and support for the many community organizing initiatives SNCC began in the south and north during the group's Black Power campaign. During the same election, Stokely Carmichael was voted in as chairman, which transformed the organization since he was perceived as militant and anti-white. ==Death==

In January 1967, her health began to decline precipitously around the same time as the splintering of SNCC, and she was admitted to a hospital. She suffered for ten months from a rare blood disease, and in April of that year she was diagnosed with terminal cancer. She died on October 7, 1967, aged 26. One of her co-workers claimed, "She died of exhaustion…she was destroyed by the movement." She was buried in South-View Cemetery in Atlanta. ==Legacy==

Smith-Robinson is the subject of a biography by Cynthia Fleming, entitled Soon We Will Not Cry (1998). ==References==

• http://www.stanford.edu/group/King/chronology/details/660616.htm • Garland, Phyl. "Builders of a New South", Ebony (August 1966) • Jones, Matthew. Personal interview (April 24, 1989) • Minnis, Jack. Personal interview (November 4, 1990). ==Further reading==