Sojourner Truth
Abolitionist Preacher (1797-1883)

In 1997, a 12-year old girl, Valerie Ambroise, won a worldwide competition to name the rover that would explore the surface of Mars.  She suggested the name “Sojourner” to honor the 200th birthday of her heroine, Sojourner Truth, who fought to end slavery, establish women’s rights, and abolish capital punishment. Nearly six feet tall, with a sharp wit and fearlessly outspoken, Truth – an illiterate ex-slave herself –  was as revolutionary in her time as a rover landing on Mars is in ours. 
                                       - Margaret Wakeley

Sojourner Truth was born a slave in Hurley, New York, around the year 1797 (her master did not record the exact date of her birth).  Her parents named her Isabella, a name she abandoned at the age of forty-six when she took up her calling as a prophet and preacher.

Her first language was Dutch, the language of her master.  It marked her English with a strong accent, just as her back ever bore the mark of beatings she received as a child of bondage.  In her youth she was she was bought and sold a number of times.  Some of her owners were relatively benign, while others were harsh and cruel.  She was the ninth child born to her parents, but she never knew her brothers and sisters – all of them sold away to different owners.

Despite Isabella’s sufferings, her mother raised her to believe in “a God who hears and sees everything you think and do.”  Her mother told her, “When you are beaten or cruelly treated, or you fall into any kind of trouble, you must ask his help.  He will always hear you and help you.”  Indeed, throughout her life, Isabella carried on a continuous conversation with God.  Later she used to begin her speeches with the phrase, “Children, I speak to God and God speaks to me.”  She poured out her sufferings to God, and God told her that she would be free.

As a young woman Isabella was given in marriage to an older slave, with whom she bore five children.  But early one morning in 1826 she walked away from her master’s farm and stole herself from slavery, taking only her infant daughter and leaving her other four children behind.

She worked as a servant in and about New York City for a number of years.  But by 1843 Isabella became convinced that God was calling her to some greater mission.  So she set off on foot and left New York, carrying her few possessions in a pillow case, unsure about her destination, determined to be a preacher.  With her new freedom she felt it was time to replace her slave name.  After appealing to God for inspiration, she chose the name Sojourner Truth, which reflected her calling to travel “up and down the land, showing the people their sins and being a sign unto them.”

As Sojourner Truth she commenced an itinerant ministry of the word, preaching from the scriptures she had practically learned by heart and delivering God’s judgment against the evils of slavery.  Her autobiography, The Narrative of Sojourner Truth, which she dictated and published in 1847, became a powerful weapon in the abolitionist cause.  Yet, as eloquent and effective a speaker as she was in the antislavery movement, Truth divided her energies with the growing movement for women’s rights.  Many abolitionists were wary of the feminist movement, worried about compromising the struggle against slavery by linking it with another unpopular cause.  But Truth insisted that there was no separating the issues.  “colored men will be masters over the women, and it will be just as bad as before.”

In a time when the country was increasingly divided over the issue of slavery, Truth’s appearances were often met with violent mobs.  She never let fear or conflict silence her.  More than once she tamed a hostile audience with her disarming wit.  When an angry heckler once declared, “Old woman, I don’t care any more for your talk than I do for the bite of a flea,” she replied, “The Lord willing, I’ll keep you scratching.”

She never doubted that the end of slavery would come at last.  When the great abolitionist Frederick Douglass once ended a speech on a discouraging note, Truth interjected with forthright confidence, “Frederick, is God dead?”  In the end, however, the conflict over slavery led to bloody civil war.  Truth lent her energies to supporting the war effort, especially by visiting black troops who were fighting in the Union Army.  In 1864 she traveled to Washington to meet Abraham Lincoln and to encourage him in the struggle.  Moved by the sufferings of the many ex-slaves who had crowded into squalid refugee camps in Washington, she decided to stay on in the capital and minister to their needs.  She was there when the war ended at last, and on December 12, 1865, when Congress ratified the Thirteenth Amendment to the constitution, abolishing slavery in the United States.

She continued to struggle for freedom and equality until the day she died on November 26, 1883, at the age of eighty-six.  She was widely acclaimed as one of the most influential women of her day:  an illiterate black woman, a political activist without office, a preacher without credentials save for her penetrating and holistic vision of God’s justice.

In one of her most famous speeches, she rose in a women’s rights meeting to respond to those men who had spoken with patronizing solicitude of women’s weakness and consequent subordination to men:

I have plowed and planted and gathered into barns, and no man could head me – and ain’t I a woman?  I have born’d five childrun and seen ‘em mos’ all sold off into slavery, and when I cried out with a mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard – and ain’t I a woman?...Den dat little man in black dar, he say women can’t have as much rights as man, ‘cause Christ warn’ a woman.  Whar did your Christ come from? Whar did your Christ come from?  From God and a woman!  Man had nothing to do with him!

A few days before she died, Truth said to a friend, “I’m not going to die, honey.   I’m going home like a shooting star.”  Her star still shines.

Additional Resources
See: Joyce Hollyday et al., “Ain’t I a Woman?" Sojourner Truth (New York:  Chelsea House, 1988)

For more information, visit the Sojourner Truth Institute website.