Abolitionist and a women’s rights activist, emancipated slave and itinerant evangelist, Sojourner Truth was born Isabella Baumfree, a slave in Dutch-speaking Ulster County, New York between 1797 and 1800. Truth was one of the 10 or 12 children born to James and Elizabeth Baumfree. Isabella was sold away from her parents at just nine years old to a farmer named John Neely. The Neely family was very cruel to Isabella. They beat her frequently and mocked and punished her for not understanding English. She spoke only Dutch until she was sold and separated from her family at the age of eleven. Within a year of being separated from her parents, Isabella had three different enslavers. Isabella’s new enslaver was John Dumont. of West Park, New York. Considerable tension existed between Truth and Dumont's wife, Elizabeth Waring Dumont, who harassed her and made her life more difficult.
John was a prosperous farmer who made Isabella work in his home and fields. Isabella grew up tall and strong, and John bragged to his neighbors that she worked harder than any of his male workers, enslaved or free. At around the age of 14, Isabella fell in love with an enslaved man named Robert from a nearby farm. But the couple was not allowed to marry since they had separate owners. Instead, Isabella was forced to marry another enslaved man owned by Dumont named Thomas. During Isabella’s early life, New York passed a series of gradual emancipation laws that would ultimately abolish the practice of slavery in the state. According to these laws, Isabella was to gain her freedom on July 4, 1827. John promised her that he would set her free one year earlier, if she would do well and be faithful.” When the time came to fulfill the agreement, Dumont alleged that Truth failed to uphold her end of the bargain,
Isabella Baumfree then decided to escape, and she walked away from the Dumont farm carrying her infant daughter in late 1826. At age 29, “she walked away” from slavery with her youngest child, Sophia, having known five “masters”, whippings, deprivation, betrayal, and the selling away of her parents’ as well as her own children. She had to leave her other children behind because they were not legally freed in the emancipation order until they had served as bound servants into their twenties. She later said, "I did not run off, for I thought that wicked, but I walked off, believing that to be all right." Isabella made her way to New Paltz, New York, where she and her daughter shelter and employment with Isaac and Maria Van Wagenen family. The Van Wagenens were abolitionists and Quakers. When John Dumont sought to reclaim his “property,” the Van Wagenens offered to buy Isabella’s freedom for $20.
The law freeing the enslaved in New York took effect the next year. To mark her new status as a free woman, she assumed their name and changed her name to Isabella Van Wagenen. While free, Isabella discovered that her son, Peter, had been sold by Dumont to a relative, who had sold him to one Solomon Gedney. Since her son Peter, had been emancipated under New York Law, Isabella sued in court and won his return. Truth became one of the few Black women to go to court against a White man and win the case. The Van Wagenens had a profound impact on Isabella’s spirituality and she became a fervent Christian. After gaining her freedom, Truth preached about abolitionism and equal rights for all. While she was fighting for custody of her son, Isabella experienced a spiritual awakening. In 1827, she became a Christian and participated in the founding of the Methodist church of Kingston, NY.
She dedicated herself to doing God’s work in the future. In 1828, Isabella moved to New York City, where she worked as a domestic servant for evangelist preacher Elijah Pierson. When Elijah Pierson died, Isabella was accused of poisoning him and of theft but she was eventually acquitted. She joined the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, which allowed her to meet and speak with many Black community leaders. Isabella continued to explore her new religious calling and learned more about the abolitionist movement. She also found new causes to champion, including temperance, women’s rights, Black uplift, and pacifism. She took up teaching and preaching in New York’s poorest neighborhoods, boldly going places other women activists feared to visit.
For the next 11 years, Isabella continued working before undergoing a second spiritual transformation. To mark the start of this new chapter in her life, Isabella wanted to change her name. In 1843, Isabella underwent a spiritual awakening. She gave herself the name Sojourner Truth, divinely inspired to “travel up and down the land showing people their sins and being a sign to them.” She became convinced that God had called her to leave the city and go into the countryside to “testify the hope that was in her.” Taking along only a few possessions in a pillowcase, she left New York City. She then spent the rest of her life advocating for the rights of Blacks and women. In 1844, she joined the Northampton Association of Education and Industry in Florence, Massachusetts.
Founded by abolitionists, the organization supported women's rights and religious tolerance as well as pacifism. There were, in its four-and-a-half year history, a total of 240 members, though no more than 120 at any one time. They lived on 470 acres, raising livestock, running a sawmill, a gristmill, and a silk factory. Truth lived and worked in the community and oversaw the laundry, supervising both men and women. While there, Truth met William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, and David Ruggles. She never shied away from challenging these celebrities in public when she disagreed with them. Encouraged by the community, Truth delivered her first anti-slavery speech that year in front of a full audience. Garrison was especially impressed by Truth, as was another abolitionist, Olive Gilbert. In 1850, Truth dictated her autobiography to Gilbert, and Garrison paid for the publication of "The Narrative of Sojourner Truth": A Northern Slave.
Even though she couldn’t read or write, her thrilling speeches won her the respect of many educated people fighting for the rights of Black people and women. Her speeches often highlighted the intersectionality of her identity, emphasizing that the struggles for racial and gender equality were deeply interconnected. In 1845, she joined the household of George Benson, the brother-in-law of William Lloyd Garrison. In the 1850s, Sojourner spoke before countless audiences travelling throughout the Midwest, where her reputation for personal magnetism preceded her and drew heavy crowds. She supported herself by selling copies of her book. Then she traveled west to continue her teaching. Although he admired her speaking ability, Douglass was patronizing of Truth, whom he saw as "uncultured." Years later, however, Truth would use her plain talk to challenge Douglass.
Unlike most of the Black women who were also monumental figures in advancing African American rights and women’s rights during this period, Truth had come from a humble background of enslavement and was part of a family with recent African antecedents. In contrast, most of Truth’s African American women contemporary activists, including figures like Maria Stewart and Mary Ann Shadd Cary, had come from closely connected networks of free black or enslaved mulatto elite backgrounds and had early access to property and education. Some of these reformers promoted “respectability politics”—the ideology that encouraged adherence to White middle class norms and eschewed “low class” behaviors. Truth’s religious beliefs and focus were on racial and gender uplift. This made her a piece with other Black women racial rights and women’s rights reformers of the immediate antebellum and postbellum period.
The Ohio Anti-Slavery Bugle endorsed her efforts, helping her secure additional speaking opportunities across the state. She also attended a suffragist "mob convention" at the Broadway Tabernacle in New York City. In 1853, Truth eventually met Harriet Beecher Stowe, who wrote about her for the Atlantic Monthly and wrote a new introduction to Truth's autobiography. Sojourner Truth was a highly visible, eloquent and moving abolitionist speaker and activist. In May 1851, she joined the abolitionist George Thompson on a joint lecture tour where she attended the Ohio Women’s Rights Convention in Akron, where she delivered her speech “Ain’t I a Woman?” This was one of the most famous speeches on Black Americans and women’s rights in American history. It challenged prevailing notions of racial and gender inferiority and highlighted the strength and resilience of Black women. Sojourner encountered fierce opposition from pro-slavery groups wherever she traveled. She was often attacked, and on one occasion, she was beaten so severely that she was left with a limp for the rest of her life.
Between 1851 and 1856, Truth spoke before more and more audiences on slavery, women's suffrage, and temperance. She later purchased a property in Northampton, Massachusetts, where she planned to make her home. At the beginning of the Civil War, Sojourner dedicated her considerable talents to supply troops with needed clothing, blankets, and food, and to recruit Black soldiers for the Union. Although she was a pacifist, she believed that the war was a fair punishment from God for the crime of slavery. In 1864 she went to Washington, D.C. and worked for the National Freedman’s Relief Association (the Freedman's Bureau), striving to improve the lives and prospects of free Black people. That fall, she was invited to meet President Abraham Lincoln. While there, she challenged the city's discrimination, that street cars were segregated by race and won, permitting Blacks to ride at the front of the cars with Whites.
During the Civil War, Sojourner Truth took up the issue of women's suffrage. She was befriended by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, but disagreed with them on many issues, most notably Stanton's threat that she would not support the Black vote if women were not also granted the right. Stanton felt that White women’s rights should take priority over the rights of Black people (understood as Black men), and that Black men, if given rights over White women, would be, because of their “degraded” and “oppressed” status, “tyrannical” when it came to White women. Although she remained supportive of women's suffrage throughout her life, Truth distanced herself from the increasingly racist language of the women's groups. Following the war, she settled in Battle Creek, Michigan, where she joined a religious commune Methodist movement that evolved into the Seventh-day Adventists.
In 1867, Sojourner Truth reminded attendees of the Equal Rights Association meeting that “they had to keep the thing going while things are stirring” for “women have no right, no voice, nobody speaks for them.” The women’s rights movement split over the issue of Black male enfranchisement. Sojourner Truth attempted to weave the factions together, and was correct in her post-war assessment that not enfranchising Black women would delay Freedom for all women. Sojourner Truth was very clear, very early that legal Emancipation was not full Freedom. Although she was correct in that regard, the 15th amendment DID NOT include women's right to vote. During Reconstruction, Truth advocated for land grants for former slaves, arguing that they should be given parcels out west. In 1872, she attempted to vote in the presidential election in Battle Creek, but she was turned away.
The 1879 spontaneous exodus of tens of thousands of freed people from southern states to Kansas was the culmination of one of Sojourner Truth's most fervent prayers. After the Civil War, Truth had traveled to Washington to work among destitute former slaves. Inspired by divine command, Truth began agitating for their resettlement to western lands. Truth endorsed a general plan to Christianize, educate, and provide land for freedmen. She drew up a petition (which probably never reached Congress, as intended) and traveled extensively, promoting her plan and collecting signatures. Truth attempted to convince politicians that since the future of her people was at stake, money used to imprison vagabond children could be better used to give them homes, churches, and schools. She saw the Exodusters, led by Benjamin "Pops" Singleton, fleeing violence and abuse in the South, as evidence that God had a plan for African-Americans.
Sojourner Truth continued her crusade until failing health and age slowed her down and then confined her to her home in Battle Creek, Michigan. Truth died in Battle Creek, Michigan, in November of 1883, after almost a century of struggle for social reform. Sojourner Truth was a pioneer for civil and human rights. Overcoming the challenges of slavery, illiteracy, prejudice, and sexism in her own lifetime, she was a powerful voice for the voiceless and a symbol of strength and hope for those who had been denied their rights. She is remembered as a true pioneer for civil rights and for her unwavering commitment to justice, equality, and freedom. Sojourner Truth believed that all people could be enlightened about their actions and choose to behave better if they were educated by others, and persistently acted upon these beliefs. Throughout her life, Truth continually reminded her allies that Black women were half the slave population, and that without changing the conditions of all women’s oppression, Black women would not achieve freedom.