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I wanted to write about the anniversary of Sojourner Truth's "Ain't I A Woman?" speech. As I started my research, I discovered that she had lived for many years in a Utopian community not far from where I was raised and now live. And there wasn't one whisper about it during my entire school years here. She had two historical stripes against her where history books were concerned -- she was black, and she was a woman.
I asked several other women in my town if they knew she had lived near here. None of them know that. Yet, in 2001 a monument was put up to her in Florence, Massachusetts, a mere 20 minutes away. A friend and I drove up to see it last week, and she took this picture.
In 1851, at the Woman's Convention in Akron, Ohio, Sojourner, a former slave, delivered some version of her famous speech. I say "some version" because the original was not ever written down. Sojourner spoke extemporaneously, and there are differing accounts of the speech -- most notably of her dialect and the number of her children. But all agree that she did speak powerfully and memorably.
But before we see the speech, learn with me what our history books did not tell us. She deserves our attention.
Sojourner was born into slavery as Isabella Baumfree. Later, while held as a slave by the Dumont family, she married a fellow slave and had five children. She escaped with her daughter, Sophia, and worked for a Quaker family, the Van Wagenens, taking their name. She traced one of her children that had been sold down to Alabama. She was able to sue for his return to her as he had been emancipated in NY earlier.
In 1843 she took a new name, self-given -- Sojourner Truth -- and began to travel as an itinerant preacher and abolitionist.
The Massachusetts Sojourner Truth Memorial website adds:
After several months of traveling, Truth was encouraged by friends to go to the Northampton Association, which had been founded in 1841 as a cooperative community dedicated to abolitionism, pacifism, equality and the betterment of human life. There, she met progressive thinkers like William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass and David Ruggles, and the local abolitionists Samuel Hill, George Benson and Olive Gilbert. Douglass described her at the time as “a strange compound of wit and wisdom, of wild enthusiasm and flintlike common sense.
After the community shut down, she bought a house in town. Although she neither read nor wrote, in 1850 she composed a book of memoirs with a ghost writer called The Narrative of Sojourner Truth: A Northern Slave (which is still in print).
In the late 1850s she moved to a Quaker community in Michigan, then after the Emancipation Proclamation, she moved to Washington, D.C. to work with former slaves in the government created Freedman’s Village. (If you do not know about Freedman's Village, click the link, please! That is another "historical secret". )
While the Civil War was still going on, she collected food and clothing for black regiments. She even met with Abraham Lincoln at the White House in 1864. While there, she challenged the racial discrimination that segregated street cars by just getting on them and riding.
After the war ended, she tried to organize efforts to provide jobs for black refugees from the war.
She then moved back to Michigan. That state has a memorial to her and a fine timeline of her life.
From that timeline, I learned that she was tireless in her campaigns for human rights until her death. She not only also campaigned for a woman's right to vote, she was the first woman to vote in a Michigan state election. She advocated for land grants in the West for former slaves. She spoke against capital punishment. She was pro-temperance.
Sojourner was almost six feet tall and had a deep and nuanced voice and a naturally commanding presence. It is easy to imagine how she held the crowd's attention with her direct words at the 1851 Women's Convention, in Akron, Ohio, 159 years ago. She stood quietly behind the podium and then spoke:
Well, children, where there is so much racket there must be something out of kilter. I think that 'twixt the Negroes of the South and the women at the North, all talking
