Truth's image on display in the National Portrait Gallery. Photo credit - WWP team.

A famous speaker and activist for racial and gender equality.

Even though she spent the first 28 years of her life in slavery, and English was not her first language, Sojourner Truth became one of the most well-known public speakers of the 19th century, advocating for equality between sexes and races. She became famous for broadening the notion of activism beyond the white, educated, middle-class women who primarily made up the suffrage movement.

Born as Isabella Baumfree into slavery, one of 10 or 12 children in a Dutch-speaking community in New York. Most of her siblings were sold to different owners, and she learned about them from her mother’s stories.

From childhood, she was sold between four masters and suffered abuse, neglect, and even rape. In 1826, She escaped with her infant daughter, Sophia, after her master broke his promise to free her, leaving her four older children behind. The Van Wagenen family from New Paltz, NY, hosted her after the escape and bought her freedom for $20.

When her previous master sold her five-years-old-son, Peter, to a new owner in Alabama, she, with the help of the Van Wagenens, sued him at the New York Supreme Court and won; she is one of the first black people to sue a white man in a United States court and prevail. She spent her first decade as a free woman doing household work in New York City.

In 1843, she followed God’s calling to become a preacher, changed her name to Sojourner Truth, and till she passed away, she toured the country advocating for various reform causes, including the abolition of slavery, peace, and women’s suffrage.

In 1850, she dictated her biography and William Lloyd Garrison published it, The Narrative of Sojourner Truth: a Northern Slave; she bought her first home in Florence, MA, and spoke at the first National Women’s Rights Convention in Worcester, MA. A year later, at Ohio Women’s Rights Convention, she gave her most famous speech, which in later years got the title “Ain’t I a Woman?”

This speech was one of the many that followed. Throughout her career, she lectured everywhere she went, from small gatherings to large conventions, advocating for African-American women’s equal rights, voting rights, and property rights.

In 1867, Truth made Battle Creek, MI, her home base, purchased a house, and settled there with her daughters. Till her last days, she never stopped preaching her truth.

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“I am a woman’s rights.”

Fun Facts

The exact year of her birth is unknown.
She never learned to read or write.
She was almost six-foot-tall.
She fell in love with an enslaved man named Robert, but they were not allowed to marry since they had separate owners; she was forced to marry Thomas, with whom she had five children.
She used to include singing in her speeches.
Her most famous speech, “Ain’t I a Woman?” was published in several newspapers; none included the question “Ain’t I a Woman?”; twelve years later, Frances Dana Barker Gage published a different version which included patterns and elements of Southern slaves, which weren't likely used by Truth. It became the most common version.
Harriet Beecher Stowe published the article “Sojourner Truth, the Libyan Sibyl" in the Atlantic Monthly magazine in 1863.
President Abraham Lincoln invited her to the White House in 1864.
When presenting a lecture in northern Indiana, audience members doubted that such a speaker could be a woman, so she showed her breast to shame them.
Her story has inspired many contemporary musicians, including ‘Sweet Honey in the Rock’, an all-woman a cappella ensemble, who recorded “Sojourner’s Battle Hymn” in 1993.
Sojourner Truth Day is observed on November 26th in Michigan.
Her statues stand in Florence, MA, Port Ewen, NY, La Jolla, CA, Washington, DC, Highland, NY, Angola, IN, Battle Creek, MI.
She is commemorated in many of the women's suffrage movement monuments in the US, including in New York City, NY, Little Rock, AR, Seneca Falls, NY, and Rockford, IL.
Many schools, shelters, streets, and other institutions were named in her honor.

Awards

Inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame

Creations By and About Her

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