Sojourner Truth
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Isabella Baumfree was born into slavery on a New York plantation in 1797. She died 86 years later in Battle Creek, Mich., as Sojourner Truth, a free woman, a well-known abolitionist and women�s rights pioneer.
Truth lived the harsh life endured by many slaves. She was sold several times, the first time when she was nine years old, and suffered mightily under the abuse of her owners, including John J. Dumont, whom she escaped from in 1827. She ended up at the home of a Quaker family, the Van Wageners, who bought her and her infant daughter from Dumont. The next year, the Van Wageners freed them under New York�s new emancipation laws. Truth�s young son, however, had been sold by Dumont, to an owner who sold him again to another owner in Alabama. With the help of the Quaker community, Truth fought through the courts to regain custody of her five-year-old Joseph.
Truth underwent a deeply religious transformation and in 1829 moved to New York City with Joseph to work as a housekeeper for a Christian Evangelist. She believed God wanted her to travel the country and speak the truth against slavery, and so changed her name to Sojourner Truth, which means �traveling preacher,� on June 1, 1843. Penniless by 1844, she stayed with the Northampton Association of Education and Industry in Massachusetts, where she met fellow abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. In 1850, Garrison published her autobiography, The Narrative of Sojourner Truth: A Northern Slave and promoted her national speaking tour.
The next year, 1851, Truth delivered her famous speech, Ain�t I a Woman, at the Ohio Women�s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio. Truth�s vigorous support of black soldiers in the Union army during the Civil War and their well-being afterward led to her meeting with President Abraham Lincoln in 1865, a meeting that was immortalized in a famous painting. In addition to abolitionism, Truth advocated other radical social reforms. She pursued land grants for freed slaves in the West, which never happened; women�s suffrage, which came long after her death; and desegregated street cars, a pursuit that would be rekindled by Rosa Parks on a bus nearly 100 years later.
She continued to champion for the causes of former slaves� rights, women�s rights and prison reform � she once spoke before the Michigan Legislature against capital punishment � up until her death in 1883 at her home in Battle Creek, Mich., where she had lived since 1867.
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