Truth, Sojourner (Isabella Baumfree)

Impact on the world

Following a profound religious awakening after her 1827 emancipation, in which she said she experienced God's presence as suddenly and completely as a flash of lightning, Truth felt a divine call in 1843 to abandon her given name, Isabella, and become an itinerant preacher; she said God renamed her Sojourner because she was meant to travel the land testifying to people's sins, and gave her the surname Truth because she was meant to declare truth to the people, building over the following four decades a ministry that wove together evangelism, abolitionism, women's rights, and temperance advocacy at camp meetings and churches across the Northeast and Midwest.

Life & background

Born enslaved as Isabella Baumfree in Ulster County, New York around 1797 to Dutch-speaking parents, Truth endured sale to multiple enslavers and the loss of most of her siblings to separate sales before New York's 1827 emancipation law freed her; she had already walked off her enslaver's farm the year before with her infant daughter after he reneged on a promise to free her early, and the following year became the first Black woman in U.S. history to successfully sue a white man in court, recovering her young son after he was illegally sold into slavery in Alabama. Around this time she experienced a profound religious conversion, later describing in her dictated autobiography how she perceived God's presence pervading the entire universe with the suddenness of lightning, and she became active in New York City's evangelical revival circles, preaching alongside controversial religious figures in the streets and eventually living for a period in a religious commune before that arrangement collapsed in scandal. In 1843, convinced she had received a direct spiritual calling, she took the new name Sojourner Truth and set out with only a pillowcase of belongings, working her way north through the Connecticut River Valley preaching repentance and salvation at camp meetings, where her commanding physical presence, powerful singing voice, and sharp rhetorical wit drew large and increasingly receptive crowds; at one 1844 camp meeting, when a mob of young men threatened to burn down the tents, she walked to a nearby hill and began singing a hymn with such force that the rioters gathered around her and were calmed rather than incited to violence. Her ministry increasingly incorporated explicit abolitionist and women's rights themes, culminating in her extemporaneous 1851 address to the Ohio Women's Rights Convention, later popularized and partly fictionalized under the title 'Ain't I a Woman?,' and during the Civil War she personally recruited Black soldiers for the Union Army, met with President Lincoln, and worked at Washington's Freedman's Hospital while riding the city's segregated streetcars specifically to force their desegregation. She died in 1883 in Battle Creek, Michigan, and in 2009 became the first African American woman honored with a statue inside the U.S. Capitol building.

Sources

1. Christianity Today; Encyclopedia.com; David Ruggles Center for History and Education; Smithsonian Magazine; New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary