Sojourner Truth

1797 – November 26, 1883

Formerly enslaved abolitionist and women's rights speaker famed for rhetorical power.

abolitionistwomens rights

Born into slavery around 1797 in Dutch-speaking Ulster County, New York, she was named Isabella Baumfree. Sold away from her parents at about nine years old for one hundred dollars, she was traded among several enslavers, endured brutal labor and abuse, and grew up speaking only Dutch. Her final enslaver, John Dumont, promised her freedom and then went back on his word, so in 1826 she walked away with her infant daughter, finding refuge with the Van Wagenen family the year before New York's gradual-emancipation law took full effect on July 4, 1827. Soon after gaining her freedom, she learned that Dumont had illegally sold her five-year-old son Peter to an enslaver in Alabama, where New York's emancipation could not reach him. She took the case to court and, in 1828, won Peter's return, becoming one of the first Black women in the United States to sue a white man and prevail. It was an early sign of the determination that would define her public life. In 1843 she experienced a religious calling, left New York, and renamed herself Sojourner Truth, a name meant to capture her mission to travel and speak the truth about justice. She joined a reform-minded community in Northampton, Massachusetts, where she met leading abolitionists including Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison. Because she never learned to read or write, she dictated her life story, published in 1850 as 'The Narrative of Sojourner Truth,' and sold copies to support herself as she toured. Truth became famous for weaving together the causes of abolition and women's rights, insisting that Black women belonged in both movements. At the 1851 Ohio Women's Rights Convention in Akron she delivered the speech now remembered as 'Ain't I a Woman?' Historians caution that its most quoted wording comes from a version published years later by Frances Gage, in a dialect Truth, a native Dutch speaker from New York, almost certainly did not use. The debate over the exact words does not diminish the power of her argument that womanhood and equality were not defined by race. When the Civil War came, Truth threw herself into the Union cause, helping to recruit Black soldiers and gathering food and supplies for the troops; her own grandson served in the famed 54th Massachusetts Regiment. In 1864 she traveled to Washington to work with the National Freedmen's Relief Association and was received at the White House by President Abraham Lincoln. She saw the war and the Emancipation Proclamation as the beginning of a long struggle rather than its end. After the war she stayed in Washington, aiding people freed from slavery and challenging segregation directly; she won a case against a streetcar conductor who had tried to keep her off. She campaigned, without success, for the federal government to grant western land to formerly enslaved families, and in 1872 she attempted to vote decades before women could legally do so. She died on November 26, 1883, in Battle Creek, Michigan, remembered as one of the most powerful moral voices of the nineteenth century.

Sojourner Truth

Further reading