Narrative of Sojourner Truth
Born into slavery in the late eighteenth century, Sojourner Truth (born Isabella Baumfree) was an abolitionist, writer, and women's rights activist. She won her emancipation in New York in 1827. After the New York Anti-Slavery Law passed, Truth recovered her son and became the first Black woman to sue a white man in a United States court and win.
She dedicated her life to advancing civil rights for women and African Americans. She traveled widely and frequently gave speeches. She met Frederick Douglass after joining a Massachusetts abolitionist organization in 1844. She was a champion of equal rights for Black women, and her most famous speech, "Ain't I a Woman?," was delivered during the Ohio Women's Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio in 1851. She published the Narrative of Sojourner Truth in 1850, and her famous speech was printed for the first time in full in an edition of the Narrative published in 1875, with a preface by Boston abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, of which Tisch Library Special Collections holds a copy.
She helped recruit Black soldiers during the Civil War in addition to aiding Black refugees. Truth later worked to find jobs for free Black Americans and petitioned for the government to resettle Black families on government land out West. She passed away in 1883.
Excerpt from "Ain't I a Woman?"
That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain’t I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man – when I could get it – and bear the lash as well! 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?