Sojourner Truth
Sojourner Truth, born around 1797 in Ulster County, New York, was enslaved there under the name Isabella Baumfree, was freed by New York's emancipation law in 1827, went to court to recover her son Peter and won, and then spent the rest of her life as a traveling preacher and public speaker for abolition and for women's rights.
She spoke at the Woman's Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio, on 29 May 1851. She died in 1883. Almost everything a reader is likely to have heard her say comes from a text published twelve years after that Akron speech, by somebody who rewrote it, and this page is about the life the speech came out of.
How she became free, and how she got her son back
She became free by statute rather than by flight. New York abolished slavery in stages, and the state's emancipation law freed her in 1827; there was no crossing of a border into a free state, and the familiar shape of an escape narrative does not fit her at all. What she did instead was go to law. Her son Peter had been sold out of the state, in violation of New York law, and she brought the case to recover him and won it. She did that before she had any public name at all, and she did it by using the law of a state that had held her in slavery within her own lifetime.
Why she changed her name
She changed her name because the work changed. Isabella Baumfree was the name she had been enslaved under; she took the name Sojourner Truth when she left New York City to travel as a preacher, and the two words describe a job rather than a family. She could not read or write. Everything of hers that survives on a page reached it through somebody else's hand, including the Narrative of Sojourner Truth, which she dictated. That single fact governs how every quotation attributed to her has to be handled.
What she argued for, and where
She argued that abolition and women's rights were one case rather than two, and she made that argument on the same platforms as the suffrage campaign's organizers. She spoke at Akron on 29 May 1851, at a Woman's Rights Convention held the year after the first national one at Worcester, Massachusetts in 1850. During the Civil War she recruited Black soldiers for the Union Army and worked among freed people in Washington, where she was received at the White House by Abraham Lincoln. In Washington she also rode the segregated streetcars and forced the conductors who tried to put her off to deal with her.
Her career overlapped the whole first half of the campaign. When the American Equal Rights Association was formed in 1866 to demand the vote for Black men and for women at once, and then broke apart in 1869 over the Fifteenth Amendment, the argument at issue was the one her whole platform career had been about: whether abolition and women's rights were one case or two, and what became of a Black woman if the answer was two.
The Akron speech exists in two texts that do not agree
The Akron speech survives in two versions, and they are not variants of one another. Marius Robinson was present at Akron and published his report in the Anti-Slavery Bugle on 21 June 1851. Frances Dana Barker Gage published a very different version in 1863, twelve years after the event, and it is the Gage version that supplied both the famous refrain and the southern dialect in which the speech is usually printed. Truth was born and raised in New York and her first language was Dutch, so a southern dialect is very unlikely to be how she sounded.
| The text | Marius Robinson | Frances Dana Barker Gage |
|---|---|---|
| Published | 21 June 1851, in the Anti-Slavery Bugle | 1863 |
| Distance from the event | Weeks | Twelve years |
| Was the writer present? | Yes | Presented as an eyewitness account |
| Dialect | None | Southern dialect throughout |
| The famous refrain | Not present in that form | Present, and this is its source |
This site treats that speech on a page of its own, titled Ain't I a Woman after the Gage version, and sets the two texts against each other there. It prints neither of them here. The point is not that the familiar version is a forgery; it is that a reader who quotes it is quoting Gage's 1863 rendering of a speech given in 1851 by a woman who could not check what had been written in her name.
What is quoted in her name, and what this site prints
Quotations attributed to Sojourner Truth circulate in enormous numbers, most of them without any source at all, and a large share of them trace back to the 1863 text rather than to anything recorded at the time. Because she could not write, there is no manuscript in her own hand to check them against, and the contemporaneous record is thin: newspaper reports by people who were in the room, and the dictated Narrative. This site quotes neither Akron text, and it does not repeat the loose quotations, because reproducing them would add a third version to a record that already has two and cannot support them.
Her last years
She spent her last years at Battle Creek, Michigan, still speaking, and she died there in 1883. That was long before the campaign she had spoken for reached its conclusion: Congress passed the Nineteenth Amendment on 4 June 1919, Tennessee ratified as the thirty sixth state on 18 August 1920, and it was certified on 26 August 1920. Susan B. Anthony, who was organizing the campaign while Truth was speaking to it, did not see that either. Nor did the amendment reach the women Truth had spoken for most directly, since it says nothing about race, literacy or the poll tax, and Black women in the South went on being kept from the polls until the Voting Rights Act of 1965.