Sojourner Truth

Sojourner Truth was an American abolitionist, preacher and campaigner for women's rights who had been born into slavery in New York State. After gaining her freedom in the 1820s she became a travelling speaker, and her 1851 address in Akron, Ohio, now remembered as "Ain't I a Woman?", made her one of the best-known voices linking the causes of Black Americans and women. Her exact birth date is unknown; her own estimate put it between 1797 and 1800.

She was born Isabella Bomefree at Swartekill, in the town of Esopus, on the estate of a slaveholder named Hardenbergh. Her father had been captured in what is now Ghana, and she was one of ten or twelve children. Her first language was Dutch, and she kept a Dutch accent all her life.

After her owner died in 1806 she was sold at auction, aged about nine, together with a flock of sheep, to a man who beat her. Sold twice more, in 1810 she came to John Dumont of West Park, who repeatedly abused her. She later married an older enslaved man named Thomas and had five children.

New York State had begun gradual emancipation in 1799, with full freedom due on 4 July 1827. When Dumont broke his promise to free her a year early, she left late in 1826 with her infant daughter Sophia, later saying: "I did not run off, for I thought that wicked, but I walked off, believing that to be all right." A family in New Paltz, the Van Wagenens, took her in and paid Dumont for the rest of her service.

Learning that her five-year-old son Peter had been illegally sold to an owner in Alabama, she sued in the courts and in 1828 recovered him, one of the first Black women to defeat a white man in such a lawsuit. She became a Methodist and in 1829 moved to New York City.

On 1 June 1843 she took the name Sojourner Truth, believing God had called her to travel and preach. She walked north through the Connecticut River valley and in 1844 joined the Northampton Association, a cooperative community of abolitionists in Massachusetts, where she met William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass and gave her first anti-slavery speech. In 1850 Garrison published The Narrative of Sojourner Truth, which she had dictated, and its sales helped her pay for a house.

In May 1851, at a women's rights convention in Akron, Ohio, she spoke without notes, arguing from her own life as a labourer that women deserved equal rights. A report published soon afterwards does not contain the famous refrain. The version known as "Ain't I a Woman?" was published in 1863 by the organiser Frances Gage, who rendered her words in a Southern dialect Truth never spoke and added details, such as thirteen children sold away, that do not fit the facts of her life.

In 1857 she moved to Michigan, living at Harmonia and from 1867 in Battle Creek. During the American Civil War she helped recruit Black soldiers for the Union army, and her grandson joined the 54th Massachusetts Regiment. In 1864 she worked in Washington for the National Freedman's Relief Association and was received at the White House by Abraham Lincoln.

After the war she backed votes for Black women as well as men, and from 1870 spent seven years seeking federal land grants for freed people in the West, meeting President Ulysses S. Grant without success. In 1872 she tried to vote in Battle Creek and was turned away.

She died at her Battle Creek home on 26 November 1883 and was buried in the city's Oak Hill Cemetery. In 2009 a bust of her was unveiled in the US Capitol, the first statue of an African American woman there.

Truth lived in the United States, in New York, Massachusetts and Michigan. Our 1815 map shows the country during her years in slavery, and the 1878 map shows the reunited nation near the end of her life.