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Day 10 - Sojourner Truth
Mar. 10th, 2018 03:31 pmSojourner Truth
Isabella Baumfree was born in 1797 in New York. She was on of 10 or 12 children and she was a slave who had several masters until she walked away with her youngest child. Slavery in New York was coming to an end anyway so she paid her former master for her time. He sold her son to a man in Alabama and Belle sued to get her son back.
She became a Christian and changed her name to Sojourner Truth. She spoke all over the North about freedom and equal rights for black people and women. She gave her famous Ain’t I a Woman speech in 1851 at the Ohio Women’s Rights Convention in Akron. Even though the speech appeared several years later in Southern speech, Sojourner was from New York and her original language was Dutch. Frances Dana Barker Gage changed it to the Southern version presumable to sound more like a former slave.
This is the original speech:
Read more about that at The Sojourner Truth Project.
She dictated her story in Narrative of Sojourner Truth: A Northern Slave, which you can download free at Project Gutenberg. Just click the word free.
Here is a photo of Sojourner Truth:
I grew up in the 60s and never heard of her in school in North Carolina but I also never learned about Susan B Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton or even Eleanor Roosevelt. Women in history were mostly irrelevant when I was growing up.
Isabella Baumfree was born in 1797 in New York. She was on of 10 or 12 children and she was a slave who had several masters until she walked away with her youngest child. Slavery in New York was coming to an end anyway so she paid her former master for her time. He sold her son to a man in Alabama and Belle sued to get her son back.
She became a Christian and changed her name to Sojourner Truth. She spoke all over the North about freedom and equal rights for black people and women. She gave her famous Ain’t I a Woman speech in 1851 at the Ohio Women’s Rights Convention in Akron. Even though the speech appeared several years later in Southern speech, Sojourner was from New York and her original language was Dutch. Frances Dana Barker Gage changed it to the Southern version presumable to sound more like a former slave.
This is the original speech:
Read more about that at The Sojourner Truth Project.
She dictated her story in Narrative of Sojourner Truth: A Northern Slave, which you can download free at Project Gutenberg. Just click the word free.
Here is a photo of Sojourner Truth:
I grew up in the 60s and never heard of her in school in North Carolina but I also never learned about Susan B Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton or even Eleanor Roosevelt. Women in history were mostly irrelevant when I was growing up.