Introduction: Sojourner Truth (c. 1797-1883)

^{Truth’s carte de visite, which she sold to raise money.}

Sojourner Truth was born Isabella (Belle) Baumfree in the town of Swartekill in Ulster County, New York. Her day of birth is unknown, but historians estimate approximately 1797. She was born into slavery, one of many siblings. Her father and mother had been captured as slaves in Africa and were sold to Colonel Hardenberg to work on his plantation in New York. As a slave, she grew up speaking Dutch. She was separated from her parents at the age of nine and sold to a man named Johny Neely, after the death of her previous owner.

In 1817, her new owner made her marry a slave named Thomas, with whom she had a son and two daughters. Truth escaped slavery with her infant daughter Sophia before July 4th, 1827, when New York was in the process of emancipating all slaves. After her escape, she learned that her son Peter was sold to a plantation owner in Alabama. She went to court, fought, and eventually won her son’s freedom. On June 1, 1843, Isabella Baumfree changed her name to Sojourner Truth. She devoted her life to Methodism and the abolition of slavery. One of her major projects was to secure land grants from the federal government for former slaves. She argued that ownership of private property, and particularly land, would give African Americans self-sufficiency and free them from a kind of indentured servitude to wealthy landowners.

In 1844, Truth joined the Northampton Association of Education and Industry in Northampton, Massachusetts. In 1850, she spoke at the first National Women’s Rights Convention in Worcester, Massachusetts. She soon began touring regularly with abolitionist George Thompson. In 1851, Truth spoke her famous “Ain’t I A Woman?” Speech at the Ohio Women’s Rights Convention. The speech was widely acclaimed for its voice of confidence and point of view – that women’s rights are not something that women do not have and are trying to gain, but instead are something they deserve and have yet to receive, since women are equal to men. Sojourner Truth’s speeches often portrayed more intersectionality of race and gender compared to other works of abolitionists and feminists of the time. At a time when the issue of slavery was building to a climax, Truth warned the white men of America of how cornered they were by oppressed women and freed slaves alike.

Truth spent her life fighting for women’s rights and women’s suffrage. She died in her home in Battle Creek Michigan on November 26, 1883, and is buried there with her family. Sojourner Truth was one of the foremost leaders of the abolitionist movement and an early advocate of women’s rights.

The following video provides some additional information about Truth’s life, and includes a quoted portion from her “Ain’t I A Woman?” speech, from the version transcribed by Marius Robinson. It also alludes to another version of the speech created by white abolitionist Frances Dana Barker Gage. Gage’s version, the one that became popularized, was an incorrect version that stereotyped Truth by using the voice of a southern black slave, a stereotyping similar to what Harriet Beecher Stowe did in an article she wrote about Truth (mentioned in the video). However, Robinson’s version, published in a popular anti-slavery newspaper, is considered to be the truest version of the original speech.

Ain’t I A Woman? (July 21, 1851)

^{transcribed by Rev. Marius Robinson}