Isabella Baumfree, nicknamed Sojourner Truth (circa 1797 – 1883) was an American abolitionist. A former slave, she became a fervent defender of the feminist and abolitionist cause.
Emancipation
Isabella Baumfree was probably born in 1797 in the city of Hurley (State of New York), in a family of slaves. She was sold at the age of eleven and then married, against her will, to Thomas Jeffery Harvey who was also a slave and with whom she had five children.
In 1827, Isabella ran away from her master's farm with her youngest child, Sophie. In 1828, slavery was abolished in New York State and Isabelle returned there to work as a servant. She worked in evangelical religious communities where she began to preach.
Ain't I a Woman?
In 1843, after settling in Massachusetts, she had a spiritual revelation. Calling herself Sojourner Truth, she began preaching for the salvation of souls and joined a utopian community, the Northampton Association for Education and Industry . She begins to campaign for the abolitionist and feminist cause. In 1851, at the Women's Rights Convention in Ohio, she delivered her famous feminist speech “Ain’t I a Woman?
"Nobody eber helps me into carriages, or ober mud-puddles, or gibs me any best place!" And a'n't I a woman? Look at me! Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed, and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And a'n't I a woman? »
The American Civil War
In 1857, Sojourner Truth was active in Michigan. During the American Civil War, she organized food drives for the fighters of the black regiments fighting for the Union. After the Emancipation Proclamation was enacted, she worked with former slaves and met President Abraham Lincoln in 1864. After the Civil War, she helped black refugees find jobs and continued to be an activist, notably defending the idea of creating a black state in the western United States.
Sojourner Truth died on November 26, 1883 in Battle Creek, Michigan.
She was enshrined in the National Women's Hall of Fame.