Sojourner Truth

Sojourner Truth was born Isabella Baumfree (the surname is also spelled Bomfree) in Ulster County, New York, around 1797; no record fixes the date, and her own Narrative places it within a few years of that. She was enslaved in a Dutch-speaking district, and Low Dutch was her first language. In 1826, a year before the 1827 date set by New York law for ending slavery in the state, she left her enslaver, Dumont; the National Park Service gives the year as 1827. "I did not run away, I walked away by daylight," she later said. She found refuge with Isaac and Maria Van Wagenen, an abolitionist family in New Paltz. When her young son Peter was sold illegally out of the state to Alabama, she went to court, and the court ordered "the boy be delivered into the hands of the mother."

In 1843 she took the name Sojourner Truth and began traveling as a preacher. Because she could not read or write, she dictated The Narrative of Sojourner Truth to Olive Gilbert; it was published in 1850. On the lecture circuit she treated slavery and the subordination of women as linked questions of who is counted as a full person.

Her best-known address, given at the Women's Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio, on 29 May 1851, survives in two versions that differ in substance. The account Marius Robinson printed in the Anti-Slavery Bugle on 21 June 1851 is in plain English and includes the lines "I am a woman's rights. I have as much muscle as any man, and can do as much work as any man." Frances Gage published a second version in 1863, twelve years later, in the New York Independent. Gage rendered Truth's speech in a Southern dialect Truth did not speak, added the refrain "ar'n't I a woman?", and had her say she had borne thirteen children and seen most sold into slavery, none of which appears in Robinson's report. The phrase by which the speech is now widely known descends from Gage's text.

During the Civil War she helped recruit Black soldiers for the Union army and met Abraham Lincoln at the White House on 29 October 1864. From 1864 she worked at Freedman's Village in Arlington, Virginia, for the National Freedman's Relief Association, helping residents find work and advising them on their legal rights. In the 1860s, when a Washington streetcar conductor tried to force her off, she had him arrested and won the case. She then petitioned Congress to grant public land in the West to formerly enslaved people; Congress did not act. She died in Battle Creek, Michigan, on 26 November 1883.