Sojourner Truth was an icon of the women’s rights and abolitionist movements in nineteenth-century America. Famously hailed as the “Libyan Sibyl” by Harriet Beecher Stowe in an article in the Atlantic Monthly, Truth was perhaps the most famous African American woman of her era. A charismatic itinerant preacher and public speaker, Sojourner Truth traveled the country as a passionate and persuasive advocate for the equal rights of all human beings, irrespective of race, class, or gender. Using her keen sense of humor and bold, eloquent speech to fight for the dispossessed and the downtrodden, Sojourner Truth created for herself a legendary status in America. Truth protested against social injustices and discrimination perpetrated on African Americans as well as women, testifying to the humiliating condition of slavery and suppression as well as to the abiding power of faith. Despite her illiteracy, Truth was a striking woman of remarkable intelligence and is thus regarded as a symbol of female strength. She was a radical of immense and enduring influence whose speeches made a lasting impression on her listeners. At an age when women in general were often forbidden to speak in public, Truth made public speaking her career and took her place among the leading thinkers, orators, and reformers of her day.
Sojourner Truth was born into slavery as Isabella in about 1797 in Swartekill, Ulster County, New York. Her parents, James (called Bomefree) and Elizabeth or Betsey (called Mau Mau Bett), were bonded slaves in the Hardenburgh plantation estate owned by the Dutch American landowner Johannes Hardenburgh and, later, by his son Charles. Truth’s parents are customarily referred to as Baumfree (meaning “tree” in Dutch), a nickname for the tall young James. Like most slaves, Isabella was illiterate and was cruelly beaten; she was ill-treated and abused as well as sold and separated from her family time and again. In 1806, when Isabella was about nine years old, she was auctioned off along with some sheep to John Neely from a place near Kingston, New York, and then in 1808 to Martinus Schryver from Kingston. In 1810, at about the age of 13, Isabella was sold to John Dumont from New Palz, New York. Around 1815, she was forced apart from Robert, a slave she loved, and forced to marry an older slave named Tom. She bore five children—three daughters named Dinah, Elizabeth, and Sophia and two sons named Peter and possibly James, who died in infancy. After being enslaved for almost twenty-eight years of her life, Isabella escaped to freedom in 1826 with her infant daughter Sophia and lived in Wagondale, New York, until the New York State Emancipation Act was approved in 1827. In Wagondale, she was employed as a domestic in the home of Isaac Van Wagener. At first she spoke only Dutch, and then later spoke English with a Dutch accent for the rest of her life. Although illiterate and unable to read, Truth not only knew parts of the Bible by heart, but she also produced a book to support herself. The Narrative of Sojourner Truth (1850), dictated by her to Olive Gilbert and including selections from her scrapbook, titled Book of Life, was republished five times during Truth’s lifetime.
Sojourner Truth was the first African American woman to win a lawsuit in America. She won her son Peter’s custody when he had been illegally sold to an Alabama plantation. Then she won a slander lawsuit against a newspaper that reported that she had poisoned a leader of a religious group, and finally she won a personal injury lawsuit after she was hit by a streetcar in Washington, D.C. In 1843, Isabella Baumfree changed her name to Sojourner Truth after she converted to Christianity in the aftermath of a religious awakening. She believed that God named her Sojourner Truth because God wished her to sojourn or travel around the country disseminating the divine truth. She became an itinerant preacher and an outspoken abolitionist and proponent of women’s rights, supporting herself and her work by selling calling cards with her photograph on them. She traveled throughout the Northeast and Midwest, speaking and singing her message publicly. From 1864 to 1867 Truth worked in Washington, D.C., counseling, teaching, and resettling freed slaves. Her causes were many: speaking vehemently for the abolition of slavery, promoting women’s rights and suffrage, advocating the rights of freedmen, lobbying for temperance, prison reform and the termination of capital punishment. Because of her national profile as a social and political reformer, Truth became a dominant figure during and after the U.S. Civil War.
Well known for her memorable wit and originality of phrasing, Sojourner Truth is perhaps best remembered for her stirring impromptu speech, Ain’t I a Woman, in which she blended the issues of women’s suffrage and abolition with civil rights. This extempore speech was delivered on the second day of the two-day Ohio Women’s Rights Convention, organized by Hannah Tracy and Frances Dana Barker Gage in Akron, Ohio, on May 28–29, 1851. A classic expression of black women’s rights, Truth’s speech was originally without a title or even a printed, authenticated version. The authenticity and accuracy of the text versions of Truth’s historical speech are disputed, as there are innumerable disparities in each written or recollected version. The speech was originally reported briefly, in 1851, in two contemporary newspapers: the New York Tribune and The Liberator. The first transcript of the speech was published in the Ohio Anti-Slavery Bugle on June 21, 1851, by Marius Robinson, the convention’s recording secretary and editor of the newspaper. In April 23, 1863, Frances Dana Barker Gage, the president of the Ohio Convention, published a different version that became widely popular as Ain’t I a Woman?, taking its oft-repeated question as a cue. Republished in 1875, 1881, and 1889 and included in the first volume of the celebrated The History of Woman Suffrage (1881), Gage’s version of the speech became the historic model. Gage’s version, like Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1863 Atlantic Monthly article, thus not only brought Truth before a national audience but it also romanticized her portrait in current racial tropes, forming in turn the basis for some misconceptions about Truth’s image and legacy and giving her life a legendary status.
One of the great women of black history, Sojourner Truth died at her home in Battle Creek, Michigan, on November 26, 1883, and was buried at Oak Hill Cemetery. Her biography, The Narrative of Sojourner Truth: A Northern Slave, dictated to Olive Gilbert and privately published in 1850 by William Lloyd Garrison, is one of the most powerful and significant slave narratives of nineteenth-century America. The sculptor William Wetmore Story made a statue of Sojourner Truth called The Libyan Sibyl, inspired by Harriet Beecher Stowe’s romanticized description of Truth, that was exhibited at the 1862 World Exposition in London. Sojourner Truth continually remade herself—transforming herself from a slave to a well-known African American abolitionist and antislavery speaker. Truth died a legend, held in high repute as an orator, public speaker, author, women’s rights activist, and a spokesperson for the rights of black women; her words of empowerment serve as an eternal source of inspiration for black women the world over.
Sutapa Chaudhuri
See also Tubman, Harriet
Further Reading
Bernard, Jacqueline. 1990. Journey Toward Freedom: The Story of Sojourner Truth. New York: Feminist Press.
Mabee, Carleton. 1993. Sojourner Truth: Slave, Prophet, Legend. New York: New York University Press.
Murphy, Larry G. 2011. Sojourner Truth: A Biography. New York: Greenwood Press.
Painter, Nell Irvin. 1996. Sojourner Truth: A Life, a Symbol. New York: W. W. Norton.