This TED Talk features social activist Ruby Sales, recorded live at TED Salon, humanizing

our future, 2018.

I want to share with you a moment in my life when the hurt and wounds of racism

were both deadly

and paralyzing for me.

And I think what I've learned

can be a source of healing

for all of us.

When I was 17 years old,

I was a college student at Tuskegee University,

and I was a worker in the Southern Freedom Movement, which we call the Civil Rights Movement.

During this time, I met another young 26-year-old,

white seminarian college student named Jonathan Daniels

from Cambridge, Massachusetts.

He and I were both part of a generation of idealistic young people

whose life had been ignited by the freedom fire

that ordinary black people were spreading around the nation

and throughout the South.

We had come to Lowndes County to work in the movement,

and it was a nonviolent movement to redeem the souls of America.

We believe that everyone, both black and white,

people in the South,

...