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| Portrait of Sojourner Truth by Andrew Barthelmes (2003) |
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Sojourner Truth, preacher, abolitionist, reformer, was born in a Dutch settlement in Ulster County, New York. Named Isabella Baumfree at birth, her parents, James and Betsy, were slaves. Truth experienced a great deal of cruelty and was sold to different masters several times during her childhood. Sojourner Truth's first language was Dutch, though she learned English after she was sold to an English-speaking owner at age eleven. From 1810-1827, she lived in a household in New Paltz, New York, and had at least five children with a slave named Thomas; of the four who survived infancy, two were sold away. In 1827~a year before the mandatory emancipation of slaves in New York State~she fled slavery with the assistance of Quaker friends. Sojourner Truth joined the Mother Zion African Methodist Episcopal Church when African-Americans were denied membership in St. George's Church, Philadelphia.(1)
Sojourner Truth was a mystic who had visions and heard voices that she experienced as from God. In 1829, she moved to New York and began a ministry as a street preacher and evangelist, and did missionary work among the poor. In 1843, she had a spiritual experience that inspired her to set out on her own and change her name, from Isabella Baumfree to Sojourner Truth. She set off on a preaching tour, walking from Long Island to Connecticut, eventually ending up in Northampton, Maine. In Maine she joined the Northampton Association for Education and Industry, a community that included abolitionists such as Fredrick Douglas, William Lloyd Garrison, and Olive Gilbert. Sojourner Truth supported herself on the proceeds from the publication of her story, The Narrative of Sojourner Truth, as dictated to Gilbert. In the 1850s, she undertook a popular speaking tour throughout the Midwest, and eventually settled in Battle Creak, Michigan.(2) Her most famous speech, "Arn't I a Woman?" was given at a woman's rights convention in Akron, Ohio in 1851.
After the Civil War, Sojourner Truth continued in public speaking and worked tirelessly to assist newly freed slaves. She was also known as the "Miriam of the Later Exodus."(3) Sojourner Truth continued her active ministry with reform causes until illness forced her to reture; she died in Michigan in 1883. She is commemorated in the Episcopal calendar on July 20 alon gwith Amelia Bloomer, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Harriet Ross Tubman.
Notes
1. Lesser Feasts and Fasts (2000) (New York: Church Publishing, 2001): 295-96. The primary source for Sojourner Truth is Olive Gilbert, The Narrative of Sojourner Truth (Battle Cree, Michigan, 1878)
2. Carla L. Peterson, Doers of the Word: African-American Women Speakers and Writers in the North (1830-1880) (New Brunswick: Rugers University Press, 1998.):24-28.
3. LFF, 293.
Excerpt from Freedom is a Dream. Sheryl A. Kojawa-Holbrook, ed. (New York: Church Publishing, 2002): 13-14. Reprinted with permission.