Local History

Above photo from Biography.com

In honor of March being Women’s History Month, we are highlighting a handful of important women who made strides in the social, political, and economic climates of our region. 

Sojourner Truth was an African American evangelist, abolitionist, women’s right activist, and author in the nineteenth century. Born into slavery, Truth escaped to freedom in 1826 and later preached about abolitionism and equal rights for all, becoming one of the most well-known human rights advocates in American history.  

Early life 

Sojourner Truth was born Isabella Bomfree in 1797 Ulster County, New York. According to the National Women’s History Museum, Truth was born into slavery, and her enslavers bought and sold her four times and subjected her to “harsh physical labor and violent punishments.” 

When Truth was a teenager, she was forced to marry another enslaved man, Robert, with whom she would go on to have five children. In 1827, after Truth’s enslaver, John Dumont, failed to honor his promise to free her and uphold the New York Ani-Slavery Law of 1827, Truth ran away with her infant, Sophia, to a nearby abolitionist family, the Van Wageners. Although, according to an article from the National Park Service, she later told her enslaver, “I did not run away, I walked away by daylight.” 

After the New York Anti-Slavery Law was passed, Dumont illegally sold Truth’s five-year-old son, Peter, into slavery in Alabama. The Van Wageners bought Truth’s freedom for twenty dollars, and helped Truth successfully sue for Peter’s return. This case made history, as Truth was the first Black woman to sue a White man in a United States court – and win. 

In 1828, Truth moved to New York City where she worked for a local minister, and by the 1830s, she was actively participating in the religious revivals across the state. “In 1843, she declared that the Spirit called on her to preach the truth, renaming herself Sojourner Truth.”

Preacher, speaker, author 

In 1844, Truth joined a Massachusetts abolitionist organization called the Northampton Association of Education and Industry, through which she met leading abolitionists William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass. After conversations with Garrison and with encouragement from his anti-slavery organization, Truth began giving speeches about the evils of slavery and the effects on the enslaved. 

While Truth never learned to read or write, she dictated what would become her autobiography, The Narrative of Sojourner Truth. Olive Gilbert penned the book on behalf of Truth and assisted in its publication. Truth’s narrative garnered her national recognition, which led her to meet women’s rights activists Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. As a result of her time spent with women’s rights activists, in 1851, “Truth began a lecture tour that included a women’s rights conference in Akron, Ohio, where she delivered her famous ‘Ain’t I a Woman?’ speech.” 

This speech is now recognized as one of the most famous abolitionist and women’s rights speeches in American history. In her speech, Truth challenged the prevailing notions of racial and gender inferiority by “reminding listeners of her combined strength (Truth was nearly six feet tall) and female status.”

A transcript of the speech, published by the National Park Service, states, “That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain’t I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man – when I could get it – and bear the lash as well! And ain’t I a woman? I have borne thirteen children and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain’t I a woman?” 

According to the History Channel, a subset of A+E Television Networks, this version of Truth’s speech was published by Frances Gage 12 years after the speech actually took place. Various details of Gage’s account of the speech have been questioned for their accuracy – such as including that “Truth said she had 13 children (she had five) and that she spoke in dialect.” 

In her account, Gage also wrote that Truth used the rhetorical question, “Ar’n’t I a Woman?” Some reports of Truth’s speech did not include this slogan at all and instead quoted Truth in standard English. In later years, this slogan was further changed to “Ain’t I a Woman?,” which reflected the false belief that Truth would have had a Southern accent, despite the fact that she was a born and bred New Yorker. 

“There is little doubt, nonetheless, that Truth’s speech – and many others she gave throughout her adult life – moved audiences,” the History Channel writes. “Another account of Truth’s 1851 speech, published in a newspaper about a month later, reported her saying, ‘I have plowed and reaped and husked and chopped and moved, and can any man do more than that?’” 

Advocacy during the Civil War 

Truth continued speaking nationally well into the 1860s, and when the Civil War started, she urged young men to join the Union cause and helped organize supplies for Black troops. Following the war, she was invited to the White House to meet Abraham Lincoln, and later, became involved with the Freedmen’s Bureau, helping the formerly enslaved find jobs and build new lives. 

“While in Washington DC, she lobbied against segregation, and in the mid 1860s, when a streetcar conductor tried to violently block her from riding, she ensured his arrest and won her subsequent case,” the National Women’s History Museum writes. “In the 1860s, she collected thousands of signatures on a petition to provide formerly enslaved people with land, though Congress never took action.” 

Truth spent her final years in Battle Creek, Michigan, where three of her daughters lived. She passed in 1883 and records show she was 86 years old when she passed, but her memorial tombstone states that she was 105. 

“Truth left behind a legacy of courage, faith and fighting for what’s right and honorable,” the History Channel writes. “Perhaps Truth’s life of Christianity and fighting for equality is best summed up by her own words in 1863: ‘Children, who made your skin white? Was it not God? Who made mine Black? Was it not the same God? Am I to blame, therefore, because my skin is Black? …. Does not God love colored children as well as white children? And did not the same Savior die to save the one as well as the other?’”