Sojourner Truth and the Speech We Must Handle Carefully

In the nineteenth century there lived a woman who had been born a piece of property and died a free preacher of the living God. Her name was Sojourner Truth. She came into the world around 1797, enslaved in the Dutch-speaking country of upstate New York, and the first language on her tongue was not English but Dutch. She was bought and sold like livestock. She watched her own children taken from her. And when New York finally moved to free its enslaved people, one of her sons was sold illegally into the deep South. Sojourner Truth did something almost unheard of for a Black woman of her time. She went to court. And she won her boy back.

That was the shape of her whole life. She would not be told that she did not count.

Now we come to the moment most people remember, and here we must walk carefully, because the truth of it matters to her. The year is 1851. There is a gathering in Akron, Ohio, where women and their allies are arguing for the dignity and the vote of women. The air is thick with men who say women are too weak, too soft, too delicate to be trusted with public life. And then a tall woman stands. She has known fieldwork and the lash. She has borne children and lost them to the auction block. She lifts her voice and turns the whole argument on its head. If a woman is too frail for freedom, then what is she? She has ploughed. She has planted. She has carried. She has grieved. And is she not a woman still?

Here is where honesty must guard her memory. The version of that speech most of us have heard, the one stitched with a Southern drawl and the famous refrain, was written down years later by someone else, and dressed in a dialect that was never hers. Sojourner Truth did not speak like a plantation of Mississippi. She spoke in the cadence of Dutch New York. To honour her is to refuse the costume that was put on her after the fact. Her courage needs no embroidery. It was already enough.

What she did in that room was confront two great lies in a single breath. The first lie said a human being could be owned. The second lie said a woman had no place to speak to the public conscience. She struck them both down at once, and she did it as a believer. Her dignity, she knew, did not come from the approval of powerful men. It came from God, who made her, who heard her crying for her children, who set her free.

She never learned to read. She had others read the Scriptures to her, and she carried them in her heart and spoke them on the road. She took the name Sojourner because she believed she was sent to travel and testify, and Truth because that was the only thing she meant to tell. For decades she walked the country preaching against slavery, pleading for the freedwomen and freedmen, asking the nation to be what it claimed to be.

When she died in 1883, she left behind no fortune and no monument she had built for herself. She left a voice. And the strange and holy task that falls to anyone who repeats her words is to repeat them truthfully, and not to put a false tongue in the mouth of a woman who spent her life telling the truth at great cost. That is the harder kind of honour. Not to make her a slogan. Not to make her a mascot. But to let her stand as she stood in Akron, tall and unbought, and to hear the question she left ringing in the air. Am I not a woman? Was I not made, like you, in the image of God?