Sojourner Truth
(1797–1883)

One of the most famous nineteenth-century black American women, Sojourner Truth was a freedom fighter and a human rights activist whose mission in life was to help abolish slavery and free her people. She was born Isabella Baumfree, the daughter of an African slave. At age nine, she was auctioned to an Englishman named John Nealy. She then belonged to several other owners before she was sold to her longtime master, John Dumont of New Paltz, N.Y.

In 1827, after New York had passed an emancipation act freeing slaves, Isabella went to New York City and became involved in a series of religious movements. She became disillusioned with her life and left New York in 1843 to begin a pilgrimage to teach the gospel. She assumed the name Sojourner Truth as a symbolic representation of her mission. She also applied her religious fervor to the Abolition movement and worked with noted abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison.

Unable to read or write, Truth dictated her memoirs to Olive Gilbert and published them in 1850 as The Narrative of Sojourner Truth. She gained a reputation as a talented and powerful orator and drew large crowds wherever she spoke. Her most famous speech was "Ain't I a Woman?" She delivered the speech on May 29, 1851 at the Women's Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio. After the Emancipation Proclamation was signed into law in 1863, Truth continued to help refugee slaves in the Washington, D.C. area and met with President Abraham Lincoln. Despite her poor health, Truth continued to fight a number of causes in her later years, including ending discrimination and supporting the women's suffrage movement.

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