I have known about Sojourner Truth most of my life, but she always seemed larger than life and more like a myth than an actual person. It turns out the actual person, Isabella Baumfree, was born in 1797 and was enslaved on a farm in the town of Esopus in Ulster County, New York in the Hudson Valley. At the age of 29 she liberated herself from a by walking 11 miles to freedom over the Shaupeneck Ridge carrying her infant daughter, Sophia, the youngest of her four children. She found help from Quaker Levi Rowe and his wife who lived in a cabin in her path. (scenichudson.org) They directed her to the Van Wagenen family who took her in and helped her buy her freedom from from her enslaver for $20 and her daughter for $5 one year before slavery was outlawed in New York state.

In 1828 Sojourner Truth sucessfully sued for the freedom of her son, Peter, in the Ulster County Courthouse. in Kingston, NY. Early in 1827, Peter had been sold and sent to Alabama illegally. She succeeded in regaining custody of her son, but Peter never recovered from the cruelty and terror he experienced while enslaved in the Deep South. While she was fighting for custody of Peter, Isabella experienced a spiritual awakening, which guided her the rest oif her life.

In 1828, Isabella moved to New York City. She joined the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, which allowed her to meet and speak with many Black community leaders. She continued to explore her new religious calling and learned more about the abolitionist movement. She also found new causes to champion, including temperance, women’s rights, Black uplift, and pacifism. She took up teaching and preaching in New York’s poorest neighborhoods, boldly going places other women activists feared to visit.

For the next 11 years, Isabella worked as domestic servant before undergoing a second spiritual transformation. She believed God was calling her to travel and preach about the causes she believed in. To mark the start of this new chapter in her life, Isabella changed her name to Sojourner Truth. She was about 45 years old.

Sojourner traveled throughout the Northeast, telling her story and working to convince people to end slavery and support women’s rights. She had little money, so she often walked from place to place and sometimes slept outdoors. She met abolitionist leaders like Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, and David Ruggles along the way. She never shied away from challenging these celebrities in public when she disagreed with them. Sojourner’s lack of education and her Dutch accent made her something of an outsider, but the power of words and her conviction impressed all those around her.

Though Truth never learned to read or write, she produced a book and sold it to support herself. This Narrative, dictated by her to Olive Gilbert was first published in 1850 and was republished five times during her lifetime. Later editions included selections from her Book of Life, a scrapbook containing newspaper articles, letters, songs etc., that she collected.

In spite of many obstacles in her life, Sojourner Truth’s tenacity, courage and conviction helped her became one of the most consequential abolitionists, and activists for African-American civil rights, women’s rights, and alcohol temperance in U.S history. (Wikepedia).