Sojourner Truth

Isabella Baumfree was born into slavery in Swartekill, Ulster County, New York, around 1797. New York abolished slavery in 1827; she had escaped a year earlier, walking off the farm of her owner with her infant daughter. In 1828 she became the first Black woman to successfully sue a white man in an American court — recovering her son Peter, who had been illegally sold into Alabama slavery — and to win.

She took the name Sojourner Truth in 1843 in obedience to what she described as a divine instruction. She had no schooling and could not read; she dictated her autobiography, the Narrative of Sojourner Truth, in 1850 to Olive Gilbert; the book financed her career as an itinerant orator.

The speech at the 1851 Women's Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio — remembered popularly under the title "Ain't I a Woman?" though the published transcript differs from later renderings — established her as the most formidable orator of the early abolition and women's-rights movements. Her phrase "and ain't I a woman?" — repeated through a series of rhetorical questions enumerating her physical labor, her childbearing under slavery, and her unrecognized humanity — has become one of the foundational utterances of American feminism.

She recruited Black troops for the Union Army during the Civil War, met with Abraham Lincoln in 1864, and conducted post-war land-redistribution advocacy.

She died in Battle Creek, Michigan, on the twenty-sixth of November 1883, age approximately eighty-six.

She is honored here as the abolitionist whose voice founded American feminism.