At a Glance
Swartekill, Dutch-Speaking Slavery, and the Earliest Losses
Sojourner Truth's earliest life was shaped by the specific conditions of New York State slavery — a slavery that differed from the cotton plantation slavery of the Deep South in its scale and its specific organisation but that was no less comprehensive in its dehumanisation. She grew up in Ulster County's Dutch-speaking farm communities, enslaved to Dutch-descended families who spoke Dutch as their primary language, and Dutch was her first and primary language throughout her life. This linguistic formation distinguished her from most of her subsequent movement colleagues and gave her public speaking a distinctive accent that she retained as a feature of her public identity rather than a deficit to be overcome.
She was sold away from her parents as a child — the standard practice of the slave system's destruction of family bonds — and sold again, and again, experiencing with each sale the specific violation of being treated as property whose disposition was determined by market forces rather than by her own choices or the relationships she had formed. She was beaten by enslavers who found her work inadequate or her manner insufficiently deferential. She was sexually abused. She had five children with an enslaved man named Thomas, watching each birth with the knowledge that the child she bore would also be enslaved and would be subject to being sold away from her at any point.
Her escape in 1826 — carrying her infant daughter Sophia, leaving behind her other children who were not yet free, walking to the home of Isaac and Maria Van Wagenen who gave her shelter and paid her enslaver — was the act that began her free life, but it was immediately complicated by the discovery that her son Peter had been sold illegally to an Alabama planter. Her pursuit of Peter's legal return — through the courts, through the legal assistance of the Quaker and Methodist communities she was becoming part of — was the first demonstration of the specific determination and strategic intelligence that would characterise her entire subsequent career.
The 1843 Call and the Self-Naming
The religious transformation that Truth experienced in 1843 — the divine call she understood as directing her to travel and to speak — was the beginning of her public career and the occasion for the act of self-naming that was itself one of the most significant acts of her life. She had been called Isabella Baumfree, inheriting the surname of one of her enslavers in the way that enslaved people were given surnames, and she now chose a name that described what she was going to do rather than who she had been owned by. Sojourner, because she would travel; Truth, because she would speak it.
The choice of this name at approximately forty-six years old was an act of self-definition by someone who had had her identity defined by others since birth. It was the assertion of an autonomous self that enslavement had tried to prevent and that freedom had made possible. It was also strategically effective: the name Sojourner Truth was unforgettable, communicated her purpose, and gave her public persona a quality of moral clarity that "Isabella Baumfree" could not have provided. She had named herself, and the name she chose was exactly right.
Her itinerant preaching career took her across the northeast and midwest, speaking at camp meetings, anti-slavery gatherings, women's rights conventions, and any other venue that would have her. She was illiterate — she never learned to read or write — and dictated her autobiography to Olive Gilbert, which was published as "The Narrative of Sojourner Truth" in 1850. The narrative's publication gave her story a national circulation and provided the specific documentation of her experience that made her speeches more powerful: audiences knew who she was before she spoke.
Akron 1851: The Speech That Named Intersectionality Before Its Name Existed
The Women's Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio, in 1851 was attended by ministers and other men who were arguing that women should not be granted rights because women were too delicate, too dependent, too in need of male assistance to be trusted with political authority. The arguments were being directed at white women who were present and who were, in important respects, representative of the genteel ideal of womanhood the arguments invoked. Truth was also present, and she was not representative of that ideal.
The speech she delivered — standing up after a minister had argued that woman's frailty and dependence demonstrated her need for male protection — made one of the most devastating arguments in the history of American political discourse. She pointed to herself: she had ploughed and reaped and husked and chopped and mowed; no man had helped her into carriages or over puddles; she had borne children and seen most of them sold into slavery; she had as much muscle as any man in the room. Was she not a woman? Had all of this happened to someone who was not a woman? And what did any of it have to do with Jesus, who had come of a woman with no man involved, making the claim that women's authority depended on male sanction theologically incoherent?
The argument she was making — that the women's movement's definition of womanhood excluded the experience of Black women, and that any definition of women's rights that did not include Black women's rights was not a definition of women's rights at all — was the first major articulation in American public life of what Kimberlé Crenshaw would name "intersectionality" a century and a half later. Truth had perceived and practised what Crenshaw would theorise: that the experience of Black women was not the experience of Black people plus the experience of white women, but a specific experience that neither category adequately captured, and that any movement addressing either racial injustice or gender injustice without addressing their intersection was addressing something less than the full reality of the people most affected by both.
The Civil War, Lincoln, and the Streetcar
Truth's work during the Civil War extended her direct action tradition into a new context: she helped recruit Black soldiers for the Union Army, collected food and supplies for Black troops, and worked with the National Freedman's Relief Association in Washington D.C. Her meeting with President Lincoln in October 1864 — which she described in her correspondence with the same directness she brought to everything else — was characteristically direct: she told him she had heard of him before he was president, he signed her "Book of Life" (an autograph book she carried), and she told him he was the best president the country had ever had, receiving the response that she was the first Black woman who had said so to him.
Her attempts to desegregate Washington D.C.'s streetcars in 1865 were among the earliest recorded examples of direct action desegregation of public transportation — fifteen years before the first organised sit-in movements and ninety years before Rosa Parks's Montgomery refusal. She simply boarded streetcars that were not supposed to carry Black passengers, stood her ground when challenged, and used the legal protections available to her to address the cases where drivers physically blocked or ejected her. She won at least one case, obtaining a judicial acknowledgment that she had been wrongfully treated.
She continued to travel and speak through the 1870s, her health gradually declining, until she settled more permanently in Battle Creek, Michigan, where the Adventist community provided a home base. She died in November 1883, at approximately eighty-six years old, having spent forty years after her 1843 transformation speaking truth to power in the most literal sense — telling audiences, including presidents, exactly what she thought, in a voice whose distinctive Dutch-accented English was as unmistakable as the argument it was making.