Sojourner Truth
c. 1797 — 1883 · Abolitionist; orator of "Ain't I a Woman?"; first Black woman to win a court case against a white man in America
Isabella Baumfree was born into slavery around 1797 in Swartekill, Ulster County, New York, one of some ten or twelve children of James and Elizabeth Baumfree, who were themselves enslaved and of African descent. Her first language was Dutch, and she was bought and sold several times through her childhood and youth, enduring hardship and separation from those she loved.
Under an 1817 New York law, slaves born before July 4, 1799 were to be freed on July 4, 1827. Unwilling to wait, she walked away from the farm of her owner in late 1826, carrying her infant daughter Sophia to freedom. When her young son Peter was illegally sold south, she went to court to recover him — and in 1828 became one of the first Black women in America to win such a case against a white man.
In 1843 she took the name Sojourner Truth, answering what she felt was a call to travel and testify. She became one of the most powerful voices of her age for abolition and for the rights of women. At the 1851 Ohio Women's Rights Convention in Akron she delivered the extemporaneous address remembered as "Ain't I a Woman?", binding the cause of the enslaved to the cause of women in words that have never lost their force.
Through the Civil War and after, she recruited Black troops, aided the freed, and pressed for suffrage and reform until her death on November 26, 1883, in Battle Creek, Michigan. Unlettered yet unanswerable, she made truth itself her name — and we honor her as one who would not be silenced.
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