Born a slave, Sojourner Truth towered over six feet. She became famous as a charismatic public speaker and songstress before, during, and after the American Civil War.
Sojourner (then called Isabel) was enslaved in New York state, which mandated emancipation beginning July 4, 1827. Sojourner’s master, however, gave her a flimsy excuse to justify feeling entitled to keep her longer. Shortly thereafter, Sojourner fled with the only one of her five children who hadn’t been sold off. She lodged with a benevolent couple, making herself helpful to them for a year. During that time Sojourner fought an uphill battle to reclaim her second-youngest child. With the advice and financial help of a sympathetic Quaker couple, she was awarded her beloved son, and thus became the first black woman ever to win such a case against a white man.
At age forty-six Sojourner felt called upon by God to preach Christianity, abolition, temperance, and black and female suffrage. Though illiterate, she spoke eloquently and had a quick mind—a mistress of salvos. One of her wittiest comebacks was in response to an apologist of slavery before the Civil War:
“Old woman, do you think that your talk about slavery does any good? Do you suppose people care what you say? Why, I don’t care any more for your talk than I do for the bite of a flea.”
Sojourner responded, “Perhaps not, but the Lord willing, I’ll keep you scratching.”
Another retort was to a pro-slavery doctor’s accusation that Sojourner was in fact a man. He demanded that she submit her breast to the inspection of the ladies present. Sojourner unhesitatingly bared her bosom to all and said, “I’ve suckled many a white babe to the exclusion of my own offspring…. This is not to my shame, but to your shame.”
By 1851 Sojourner’s valor and personal power intimidated those who opposed her, including many who were prominent at the Women’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio. Timorous, trembling suffragettes begged Frances D. Gage, the mistress of ceremonies, to prevent Sojourner from speaking. They said, “It will ruin us. Every newspaper in the land will have our cause mixed with abolition and n*****s, and we shall be utterly denounced.”
Ms. Gage replied, “We shall see when the time comes.”
Shortly before that time came, various Christian ministers took over the floor. They had a field day claiming male superiority, to which Sojourner, from her seat in the corner, rose and slowly moved to the front.
“Dat man ober dar say dat women needs to be helped into carriages, and lifted ober ditches, and to have de best place every whar. Nobody eber help me into carriages, or ober mud puddles, or gives me any best place, and ar’nt I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! (She bared her muscular arm.) I have plowed, and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me—and ar’nt I a woman!”
“Den dat little man in black, dar, he say women can’t have as much rights as man, cause Christ warnt a woman. What did your Christ come from? From God and a woman. Man had notin to do wit him.”
There were roars of applause, and hundreds rushed up to shake her hand.
Now millions revere this self-assured woman. In her lifetime she received approbation from Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Abraham Lincoln, and many other eminent people. Three statues of Sojourner Truth reside in Battle Creek, Michigan; Florence, Massachusetts; and San Diego, California. There is a bust of her in our U.S. Capital’s Visitor Center’s Emancipation Hall, the first African American to have a statue there. Her image will shortly be on the back of newly minted ten-dollar bills, and an upcoming U.S. Navy ship will be named USNS Sojourner Truth.