35TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION Super Hero SOJOURNER TRUTH

Sojourner Truth 

Wearing her trademark turban and sunbonnet, ex-slave Sojourner Truth crossed the country for 40 years, drawing on her experiences and deep faith to preach against the cruelties of slavery and to support human rights for African Americans and women. 

She will best be remembered as an abolitionist, suffragist, and feminist. For more than 40 years, Sojourner Truth was also a preacher and a teacher. The great and the near-great sang her praises and quoted her strong and striking utterances. 

Truth believed it was her Christian duty to further the cause of Black people. That sense of mission won her an audience with President Abraham Lincoln. Ushered into Lincoln's presence on October 29, 1864, she showered him with unabashed praise. Truth assured him in her deep-toned voice that he was the greatest president this country ever had, a man to be likened unto Daniel, the biblical standard of courage and faithfulness. 

Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman were twin mountain peaks in the tradition of Black women. These deeply religious women practiced what they preached. They honored the human rights of Black people, many of whom were held in the bonds of slavery. 

Born Isabella Bomefree in Ulster County, New York, in 1797, Sojourner Truth had a succession of cruel slave masters. Her first master relegated her family to the cold wet cellar during Truth's early childhood. Much later, under the ownership of John I. Dumont, she met her husband, Thomas, and had five children, three of whom were sold away. 

When Dumont reneged on a promise to free Truth in 1827, a year before New York's Gradual Emancipation Act became law, Truth escaped with her infant daughter, Sophia. She found shelter with Isaac Van Wagenen, who purchased her remaining time as a slave. 

During a trip back to the Dumont home, Truth had a spiritual encounter with "God." Around the same time, she learned one of her sons had been sold illegally into slavery in Alabama. Swinging into action, she persuaded Dutch, Quaker, and Methodist residents across the county she was born in to successfully help petition for her son's freedom. 

Truth and her two children moved to New York City in 1829, where she found her brother and two sisters attending the same Methodist church she did. Truth was also involved in her employer's Perfectionist religion, for which her talents in preaching, praying, and singing were in great demand. Following an unpleasant separation from the Perfectionists, she took up residence in the Ossing, New York, commune for five years before returning to New York City. 

Truth underwent a spiritual conversion after suffering the loss of her son Peter during his first voyage as a sailor. She walked away from urban life with 25 cents and a new name that reflected her destiny to spread God's truth. 

In 1843, an illness led her to the water-cure establishment of Black abolitionist David Ruggles. Though Truth was illiterate, her forthright "turn of a phrase" so impressed the residents of Southhampton, Massachusetts, that three years later she was a full-time member on the abolitionist lecture circuit, traveling with Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison, among others. Her popularity as an advocate of women's rights grew among feminists. 

The six-foot spokeswoman worked tirelessly for emancipation, desegregation, and women's suffrage. To Truth, the race and gender movements were both of highest importance. With each speech, she broke societal conventions for women, fending off stones, beatings, and hecklers in the process. 

Once, a proslavery heckler told her, "Old woman, why I don't care any more for your antislavery talk than I do a bite from a flea." Truth smiled and replied, "Perhaps not, but the good Lord willing, I'll keep you scratching." 

She refused to let antagonists stop her. In doing so, Truth helped define womanhood in a way that embraced African-American women's experiences as well as addressing issues of gender, race, and class. "Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud puddles, or gives me any best place!" she declared at a women's rights convention in Akron, Ohio, in 1851. "Ain't I a woman?" 

Lectures and the sale of her biography, The Narrative of Sojourner Truth, provided a modest living. The book was written by abolitionist Olive Gilbert and was published by Truth in 1850. 

Truth was a resident of Battle Creek, Michigan, by the time the Civil War was at hand. She initially recruited and supported soldiers in Michigan's Black regiment. Later she intensified her contribution in the nation's capital and in Virginia. She alternately nursed injured soldiers and freed slaves at Freedmen's Hospital. Under other relief programs, she counseled freed women and established an employment service for free persons willing to relocate. 

She even found time to desegregate trolley cars. First she asked the president of the street railroad to eliminate the "Jim Crow" car. When she sued a belligerent conductor, resulting in his arrest for assault and the loss of his job, the rest of the D.G. trolley staff practically invited Blacks into their cars. 

Following the war, she encouraged former slaves to move West and often preached to these newcomers throughout Kansas and Missouri. Although no action was taken, she petitioned Congress for land allocations in the West. 

Truth remained an outspoken advocate for social reform and temperance until she died on November 26, 1883, at the age of 86.

From Great African Americans.  Copyright, Publications International, Ltd.