Truth, Sojourner

TRUTH, SOJOURNER (c. 1797–1883). Born Isabella, a slave in upstate New York, Sojourner Truth went on to become one of the two most famous African American women of the nineteenth century. (The other, Harriet Tubman, also came out of the abolitionist movement.) A woman of remarkable intelligence despite her illiteracy, Truth had a great presence. Some 5 feet 11 inches tall, she possessed a low, melodious singing and speaking voice. Making her first public appearances as a preacher in the years immediately surrounding her emancipation by New York state law in 1827, she drew on her religious convictions for the rest of her life. To transform herself from an enslaved victim of violence and sexual aggression into a powerful public presence, she called on the power of Christianity. Her tapping this source of empowerment, rather than her role as a feminist, makes Sojourner Truth a representative hero of her time.

During the late 1820s, as Truth was making the transition from slavery to freedom, she joined the Methodist church and went to court in Ulster County to recover her son Peter, who had been sold illegally into slavery in Alabama. After her emancipation and the return of her son, she moved to New York City. Immediately attracted to the come-outer holiness communities, in 1832 she joined the Kingdom of the Prophet Matthias, in which she was the only African American among prosperous whites.

Little is known of Truth’s life in New York between the breakup of the Kingdom of Matthias in 1835 and her changing her name to Sojourner Truth on the day of Pentecost, 1843. Leaving New York on foot to preach the end of the world, she landed in the Northampton (Massachusetts) Association of Education and Industry in the fall. During her decade in Northampton, Truth met abolitionists and feminists for the first time. She began addressing reform meetings in the mid-1840s and set out on her own after the 1850 publication of her Narrative of Sojourner Truth, dictated to a fellow Northamptonite, Olive Gilbert.

Truth was an abolitionist and feminist who existentially and rhetorically represented working-class American women. The only woman born into slavery to become a regular on the women’s rights and abolitionist lecture circuit, she attracted the attention of like-minded women writers. Harriet Beecher Stowe made Truth famous when she published an essay, “Sojourner Truth, the Libyan Sibyl,” in the Atlantic Monthly of April 1863.

In response to Stowe’s piece, Frances Dana Gage, an Ohio feminist who had chaired a women’s rights meeting in Akron, Ohio, in 1851 at which Truth spoke, wrote what became the most famous word portrait of Sojourner Truth in the twentieth century. A phrase of Gage’s invention—“Ar’n’t I woman?”—has practically become synonymous with Sojourner Truth and has nearly eclipsed Truth’s actual antislavery and feminist work during the 1850s and her support of freedpeople during and after the Civil War. Truth also supported woman suffrage, but her most urgent cause from the 1870s to her death was the resettlement of freedpeople on federal lands in the West. Aged and ailing, she traveled to Kansas to welcome the twenty thousand “Exodusters” (from Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Tennessee) in 1879. As a fervent Pentecostal, Sojourner Truth is an unlikely heroine for the American Left, but throughout her life she championed the cause of the poor and disfranchised, especially the least visible: Black women.

Bernard, Jacqueline. Journey toward Freedom. New York: Feminist Press, 1990..

Grigsby, Darcy Grimaldo. Enduring Truths: Sojourner’s Shadows and Substance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015.

Mabee, Carleton. Sojourner Truth: Slave, Prophet, Legend. New York: New York University Press, 1993.

Painter, Nell Irvin. Sojourner Truth: A Life, a Symbol. New York: W. W. Norton, 1996.

Sojourner Truth: A Resource Guide. Library of Congress. https://guides.loc.gov/sojourner-truth