A History
of the
American
Suffragist
Movement

 		 

Excerpt from Chapter Three: "The Spririt of a Snake" and the Spirit of Success

Sojourner Truth

from A History of the American Suffragist Movement


Sojourner Truth  

Sojourner
Truth

Far and away the most important aspect of the Akron meeting, however, was the historic speech of Sojourner Truth. Born into slavery under the name Isabella in the late eighteenth century, she was owned by Dutch-speaking people who lived about 50 miles north of New York City. By her teenage years, she had been sold three times and was scarred from beatings she suffered when she did not understand orders in English.


In 1827, a year before New York implemented its gradual emancipation plan, she ran away to a Quaker family. They not only sheltered her, but even supported her in a legal battle: amazingly enough, her son Peter, who had been sold in violation of New York law, was returned from Alabama.

Feeling "tall within," she set out for New York City. She left the Society of Friends, she said, because "they would not let me sing," and developed her own deeply personal faith: "God himself talks to me."

After a disastrous time in a New York commune that ended up with her successfully fighting a murder charge, she took the name of Sojourner Truth in 1843 and set out to preach. In traveling through New England, she came to the attention of William Lloyd Garrison and other abolitionists. When she arrived in Akron in 1851, she recently had published her autobiography, which she dictated to a white woman, Olive Gilbert. Sales of the Narrative of Sojourner Truth would support her the rest of her life, as she continued to move throughout the United States, living in Kansas during its tumultuous pre-Civil War years and finally settling in Battle Creek, Michigan.


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