Born into slavery in New York, Sojourner Truth escaped captivity just before slavery was
abolished in that state. She became a committed abolitionist and speaker against slavery
in the North, and in later years she was an equally committed advocate of full rights for
women.
She was born Isabella Baumfree in Hurley, New York, around 1797, to James and
Elizabeth Baumfree.
Little is known about Isabella's childhood. Growing up on a farm owned by a New York
Dutch couple, she learned Dutch as her first language. She was sold four times, and by
1810 she had landed on the farm of John Dumont, located near New Paltz, New York.
She became the common-law wife of another slave named Thomas and with him had
five children.
Life in the Dumont household was difficult for Isabella. John Dumont's wife abused her,
and one of her children was sold into slavery in Alabama. In 1826, a year before slavery
was outlawed in New York, Isabella ran away from the Dumont household and found
refuge with a Quaker couple. One of the first things she did was petition a local court for
the release of her son, which she accomplished around 1827.
In 1829, Isabella moved to New York City, where she fell in with a religious commune
run by Elijah Pierson. Through Pierson, she joined another commune, known as the
Kingdom of Matthias, in Ossining, New York. When this commune fell apart, she moved
back to New York City, where around 1843 she underwent an ecstatic religious
experience and believed herself to have been commanded by God to change her name
to Sojourner Truth. She felt that she had been told to travel throughout the North
testifying to the sinfulness in which Americans were living.
In the mid-1840s she settled in Northampton, Massachusetts, at the Association of
Education and Industry, a utopian community. There she met abolitionists such as
William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, and Frederick Douglass. For the next five
years, Truth traveled and spoke in the North about her experiences with slavery and
argued that it should be abolished.
In 1850, Truth met Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and other feminists at a
women's rights conference in Massachusetts. With a fervor equal to her dedication to
abolitionism, Truth threw herself into agitating for full and equal rights, including the
right to vote, for women. Over six feet tall and with intense eyes, she must have been a
formidable figure. At a women's rights conference in Akron, Ohio, in 1851, she delivered
a famous speech, "Ain't I a Woman." "That man over there says that women need to be
helped into carriages and lifted over ditches," she said.
Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, … And ain't I a woman? … I have
ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain't I a woman? …
I have borne thirteen children, and seen 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?
In the mid-1850s, Truth moved to Battle Creek, Michigan, to live with her three
daughters and her grandsons. After the outbreak of the Civil War, she recruited AfricanAmerican troops and for a while lived in Washington, D.C., where she nursed wounded
black soldiers and worked in soup kitchens set up for displaced former slaves.
After the war, she tried to interest senators in the idea of establishing a state in some
part of the West for African Americans. This proposal was never adopted, but her ideas
may have contributed to the migration of blacks out of the South to Kansas in the late
1870s.
Truth died in Battle Creek on November 26, 1883.
Further Information
Butler, Mary G. "Sojourner Truth: A Life and Legacy of Faith." Available online. URL:
http://www.sojournertruth.org/Library/Archive/LegacyOf Faith.htm. Downloaded July
1, 2009.
Marable, Manning, and Leith Mullings, eds. Let Nobody Turn Us Around: Voices of
Resistance, Reform, and Renewal: An African American Anthology. Lanham, Md.:
Rowman & Littlefield, 2009.