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Read Her Entire Auto Biography
Sojourner Truth was born a slave in Ulster County, New York about 1797. At the time of her birth, New York and New Jersey were the only northern states that still permitted slavery. Freed by the New York anti-slavery law of 1827, she became an active abolitionist.
At the time when oratory was a fine art, she was one of the most famous anti-slavery speakers of her day. She became well known among such abolitionists as William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Gerit Smith, Frederick Douglass, Martin R. Delaney, David Riggles, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Harriet Tubmanand many others. Often lashing out against the evils of slavery, she shamed many people who were apathetic and passive toward the institution of slavery. Frequently her life was threatened. She was spat upon, beaten and stoned.
Sojourner Truth Was the first prominent African American woman to become directly associated with the white women's suffrage movement. Her most famous speechcame at the 1851 Convention on Women's Rights in Akron, Ohio, in response to a clergyman's remarks ridiculing women as too weak and helpless to entrust with the vote. Truth replied:
That man over there says women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere.
Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mudpuddles, or gives me any best place! And ain't I a woman?
Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed, and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! Ain't I a woman?
I could work as much and eat as much as a man--when I could get it--and bear the lash as well! And ain't I a woman?
I have borne thirteen children, and seen them most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain't I a woman?
From her home in Battle Creek, Michigan, she traveled throughout New England, Ohio, Michigan, and Indiana urging the abolition of slavery and supporting voting rights for all women. Truth's deep bass voice, her height, and her fearless spirit, were seen by some people as evidence that she was really a man. During the course of one of her speeches in 1858, a proslavery doctor led the crowd in demanding that Truth submit her breast for examination. She replied that her breasts had suckled many a white babe, and the exclusion of her own offspring and she quietly asked them, as she opened her blouse, if they too wished to suckle.
Her final years held some disappointment. Many leaders of the women's movement with held support from the Fifteenth Amendment because it did not include women's suffrage, and the hope of the Reconstruction Period ended with the removal of federal troops from the South. Sojourner Truth died on November 26, 1883, in Battle Creek. Her funeral at the Congregational Church was said to have been the largest ever held in the town. She was buried in Oak Hill Cemetery in Battle Creek.
Sojourner Truth came to Northampton in 1843 to live at the Northampton Association of Education and Industry, a utopian community in Florence. Born a slave in upstate New York in approximately 1797, she labored for a succession of five masters until the Fourth of July, 1827, when slavery was finally abolished in New York State. Then Isabella - as she had been named at birth - became legally free.
After prevailing in a courageous court action demanding the return of her youngest son Peter, who had been illegally sold away from her to a slave owner in Alabama, Isabella moved to New York City. There she worked as a housekeeper and became deeply involved in religion. Isabella had always been very spiritual, and soon after being emancipated, had a vision which affected her profoundly, leading her - as she later described it - to develop a perfect trust in God and prayer.
After fifteen years in New York, Isabella felt a call to become a travelling preacher. She took her new name - Sojourner Truth - and with little more than the clothes on her back, began walking through Long Island and Connecticut, speaking to people in the countryside about her life and her relationship with God. She was a powerful speaker and singer. When she rose to speak, wrote one observer, her commanding figure and dignified manner hushed every trifler to silence. Audiences were melted into tears by her touching stories.
After several months of traveling, Truth was encouraged by friends to go to the Northampton Association, which had been founded in 1841 as a cooperative community dedicated to abolitionism, pacifism, equality and the betterment of human life. There, she met progressive thinkers like William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglassand David Ruggles, and the local abolitionists Samuel Hill, George Benson and Olive Gilbert. Douglass described her at the time as a strange compound of wit and wisdom, of wild enthusiasm and flintlike common sense.
When the association disbanded in 1846, Truth remained in Northampton, moving for the first time into her own home, on Park Street in Florence, with a loan from Samuel Hill. Although Truth never learned to read or write, she dictated her memoirs to Olive Gilbert and they were published in 1850 as The Narrative of Sojourner Truth: A Northern Slave. This book, and her presence as a speaker, made her a sought-after figure on the anti-slavery womans rights lecture circuit.
Over the next decade she travelled and spoke widely. She is particularly remembered for the famous Aint I A Woman?speech she gave at the womans rights convention in Akron, Ohio in 1851.
Truth moved to Michigan in 1857 and continued her advocacy. After the Emancipation Proclamationwas issued, she moved to Washington, D.C., where, in her late 60s, she began working with former slaves in the newly created Freedmans Village. She met with President Lincoln in the White House, where he told her that he had heard her speeches long before.
After the Civil War, she set out on a final crusade to gain support for her dream of a land distribution program for former slaves - an idea which, despite her lobbying, Congress refused to enact. Finally she returned to her home in Battle Creek, Michigan, where, surrounded by her family and friends, she died in 1883.
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