Sojourner Truth: A Voice for Human Rights
From Slave to Advocate for the Rights of African-Americans and Women
African-American and former slave Sojourner Truth was among the most important women in 19th Century America. As a forceful and passionate advocate for freed slaves and women, she used her intellect and powerful voice to fight for human rights.
Sojourner Truth was born into slavery in 1797 in New York to James and Betsy, the property of Colonel Johnannes Hardenberghand, and named Isabella Baumfree. Like most children of slaves, she never learned to read or write. She was sold many times and in about 1815, while owned by the John Dumont family, met and married Thomas, another slave, with whom she had five children. In 1826, carrying her infant daughter, she walked to freedom. As this six-foot, charismatic woman traveled the country as an itinerant preacher, she changed her name to Sojourner Truth and became an important voice for the abolition of slavery, women's rights and suffrage, the rights of freedmen, temperance, prison reform and the end of capital punishment.
Sojourner Truth's Religious Conversion
Sojourner Truth experienced a religious conversion and moved to New York, joining a Methodist perfectionist commune which eventually failed. In 1843, while working as a domestic servant, she believed she was receiving instructions from the Holy Spirit and became a traveling preacher. In Michigan, she joined another religious commune associated with the Friends, a religious movement that grew out of Methodism and later became the Seventh Day Adventists.
Abolitionist Advocate
In the late 1840s, Sojourner Truth became a popular abolitionist orator. When thousands of freedman and former slaves fled to Washington D.C., she worked at Freedman's Village and for the Freedman's Bureau to help them find food, places to live and jobs. She was active in relocating former slaves to western states like Kansas and lobbied the government to give them free land and pay their way to their new home sites.
Preaching at the Sabbath School Convention in Battle Creek, Michigan, in June 1863, she asked, "Does God not love colored children as well as white children? And did the Savior not die to save one as well as the other?"
Women's Rights Activist
In the 1850's, Sojourner Truth began speaking about the rights of women to vote and to be treated equally in the workplace. In her most famous speech, Ain't I a Woman, presented at a Women's Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio on May 28, 1851, she said, "I have plowed and reaped and husked and chopped and mowed, and can any man do more than that?" She continued to use her voice to demand that women deserved equal rights with men because they were equal in capacity to men.
Sojourner Truth's Honors and Legacy
As common during African-American slavery, Sojourner Truth never learned to read or write but was helped by her grandson, Sammy Banks, who accompanied her until he died at the age of twenty-four. Later, Frances Titus, wife of a prosperous Quaker miller became her friend, traveling companion, sponsor and lecture manager. It was through Titus' efforts that Franklin C. Couter was commissioned to portray the meeting between Truth and President Lincoln at the White House depicting the President showing her the "Lincoln Bible" which had been presented to him by the African-Americans of Baltimore, Maryland.
Sojourner Truth died at home on November 26, 1883 at the age of eighty-six. Among her honors is a United States postage stamp and being installed in both the Maryland and Women's Hall of Fame. In 1997, the 200th anniversary of her birth was honored with a year-long celebration in Battle Creek, Michigan. She was recognized on an interplanetary level when the Mars Pathfinder Microver was named in her honor.
Sources:
Sojourner Truth Institute of Battle Creek, Michigan
National Woman's Hall of Fame
Bibliography:
Painter, Nell Irvin. Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol. New York, W.W. Norton, 1997
Truth, Sojourner. Narrative of Sojourner Truth. New York, Barnes & Nobel Classics, 2005
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