Sojourner Truth

Sojourner Truth was an African American freedom fighter and an outstanding orator. An active reformer, she believed she had been chosen by God to help free the slaves and to raise the status of African Americans and women in the United States.

Sojourner Truth was born Isabella Bomefree (also spelled Baumfree) around 1797 on the estate of a Dutch slave owner in Ulster County, New York . Because both her parents were slaves, she was born into slavery. Her first language was Dutch and she spoke with an accent all her life. In her early childhood she witnessed her parents' grief over the loss of children who had been sold away. When she was nine years old, Truth herself was sold, and she was sold several more times in her early life. She worked from 1810 to 1827 in a household in New York where she married a fellow slave named Thomas. They had at least five children, but two daughters and a son were sold away.

Beginning a free life

In 1827 the state of New York passed an emancipation act, freeing its slaves. When her owner demanded that she serve another year, Truth ran away, leaving her children with Thomas, who died a few years later. A Quaker couple who opposed slavery, the Van Wageners, took her in. With the help of Quaker friends she successfully sued her former owner for the return of her son Peter, who had been sold illegally to an Alabama planter. While she stayed with the Van Wageners, Truth underwent a profound religious conversion.

Truth moved to New York City in 1828, where she adopted evangelical religious beliefs (the beliefs of Protestant Christians who spread the Christian Gospel as found in the New Testament). She developed a mystical faith, and throughout her life she would hear voices and see visions. In New York she began to forge a reputation as a gifted Methodist preacher.

Through working with the church, Truth met Robert Matthews (1778–1841), a traveling preacher who had declared himself a prophet (someone who speaks through divine inspiration). Truth became one of his followers in 1832. Matthews established what he called a “kingdom,” a religious commune in which Matthews' followers lived, worked, and practiced their religion together. Truth was the only black member. In 1835, the commune fell apart. Truth and Matthews were accused and then acquitted of the murder of one of the members.

Freedom and faith

In 1843 an inner voice told Isabella to change her name to Sojourner Truth (“sojourner” means temporary visitor, and spreading “truth” was her mission). She traveled around the Connecticut River valley to preach, sing, pray, and evangelize at camp meetings (religious meetings in frontier areas to which people from all over the region would travel), in churches, or wherever she could find shelter and an audience. A religious revival in the Northeast at that time provided her with an eager audience.

By the winter of 1843 Truth moved to the Northampton Industrial Association, another utopian community (a community founded in the attempt to create a perfect society), where she lived until 1846. The association aimed to reform the political economy, starting on a small scale with the cooperative production of silk. In the Northampton Association, Sojourner Truth lived with well-educated people whose main concerns were political. There she met important members of the abolitionist movement, including Frederick Douglass (1818–1895). As a result of this experience, abolitionism and women's rights became important to her and began to find expression in her preaching. She never compromised on the importance of these causes, disagreeing with abolitionists such as Douglass, who maintained that equality for women must take second place in importance to the elimination of slavery.

Autobiography and speeches

In 1850 Truth published her autobiography. She supported herself by selling The Narrative of Sojourner Truth at women's rights meetings for twenty-five cents a copy. Truth's “Ain't I a Woman?” speech at the Akron Women's Rights Convention in 1850 secured her a place in history for being one of the most significant expressions of the combined abolitionist and women's rights movement. When Truth rose to speak she was severely heckled; undaunted, she pointed out that as a female slave she had experienced the profound grief of having her own children sold away and had had to work like a man all her life; she then asked, “And ain't I a woman?” She left the stage to thundering applause. Her reputation as a brilliant speaker spread.

Civil War and freed peoples' rights

In the mid-1850s Truth moved with her daughters to Battle Creek, Michigan, a center of religious and antislavery reform movements. There she joined a commune called Harmonia. During the American Civil War (1861–65) she met President Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865; served 1861–65) and worked to help the recently freed slaves. After the war Truth worked tirelessly to assist former slaves. In 1870 she sent a petition to Congress, signed by hundreds of supporters, pleading for the allocation of government lands in the West to former slaves. Although Congress took no action on the petition, her outspoken support of western migration inspired thousands of former slaves to establish homesteads in Kansas . She traveled throughout Kansas and Missouri , giving motivational speeches to the former slaves. She also continued to speak to white audiences in the Northeast, preaching her message of a loving God and advocating temperance (abstaining from alcohol), women's suffrage (right to vote), and equal rights for blacks.

Final Years

Sojourner Truth continued to travel and speak on social reform issues as long as she was able. She received hundreds of visitors in Battle Creek until her death at age eighty-six in 1883. Her funeral was said to have been the largest ever held in Battle Creek.