07/12/2022
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Sojourner Truth (1797-1883), the daughter of enslaved Africans from Ghana and Guinea, was born into slavery in New York State where she grew up speaking Dutch. By the time Truth escaped slavery, she had been beaten daily by one of her enslavers, denied her first love and forced to marry and bear the children of an older man by another, r***d by her last enslaver (resulting in the birth of her second child), witnessed the death of her firstborn, and changed ownership four different times. In 1826 she escaped to freedom with her infant daughter Sophia, just a year before New York State finally abolished slavery, a legislative process that had begun 28 long years earlier. After New Yorkโs Emancipation Act went through, Truth learned that her five-year-old son (who, along with her other older children, she had been forced to leave behind) was illegally sold and taken to Alabama. She successfully fought for her son in court, making her the first Black woman to win a legal case against a white man.
In 1843 she changed her name from Isabella Baumfree to Sojourner Truth, and for the rest of her life she was an unstoppable force for justice. In 1851, she delivered her famous improvised speech at the Ohio Womenโs Rights Convention, offering the indisputable strength of her own body as proof of the equality of sexes. โI have as much muscle as any man, and can do as much work as any man. I have plowed and reaped and husked and chopped and mowed, and can any man do more than that?โ she asked the crowd. During the Civil War she recruited black soldiers for the Union and was consulted by President Abraham Lincoln. In 1865, the Civil War scarcely over, Truth immediately began desegregating streetcars in Washington by riding in whites-only cars (predating the Civil Rights Movement by almost one hundred years). Later in life, she lobbied the federal government for land grants for the formerly enslaved, believing that true freedom would never come without economic self-sufficiency. Today Sojourner Truth remains a righteous beacon for all devotees of truth and freedom.
