Sojourner Truth

Sojourner Truth was born into slavery in 1797 as Isabella Baumfree (sometimes spelled “Bomfree”). She was raised in a Dutch-speaking town in Ulster County, New York, and she had the first of her five children (not 13, as some sources claim), in 1815. In 1827, she and her infant daughter fled slavery and took shelter with an abolitionist family who lived nearby. The family bought Truth and two of her children out of slavery. Truth moved to New York City, where she became devoutly religious and renamed herself Sojourner Truth, claiming that the Holy Spirit had encouraged her to always preach the truth. But as Truth began speaking at increasingly prominent venues around the United States on behalf of the abolitionist and women’s rights movements, she found herself disappointed by the rhetoric of abolitionists like Frederick Douglass, who believed Black men should receive the right to vote before Black women, and many religious authorities of her era. In the 1850s, Truth moved to Michigan, where three of her daughters were living. She remained active in the intertwined fights for abolition and suffrage for all. A prolific speaker, many of Truth’s landmark speeches (most notably “Ain’t I a Woman?”) have been rewritten and, in many historians’ views, corrupted through said rewrites, over time. Nevertheless, Sojourner Truth remains an enduring icon of the abolitionist movement as well as the first wave of feminism in the U.S. Many monuments and buildings across the United States—most notably in Michigan, Ohio, and New York—have been erected and named in her honor.