Sojourner Truth

Verified Timeline

Lore & Background

Truth was born into slavery in Swartekill, New York, one of 10 or 12 children of James and Elizabeth Bomefree. Her first language was Dutch, and she continued to speak with a Dutch accent for the rest of her life. At age nine, she was sold at auction with a flock of sheep for $100 to John Neely, who beat her daily. She was later sold to Martinus Schryver, then to John Dumont, who raped her repeatedly. Around 1815, she fell in love with a slave named Robert, but his owner forbade their relationship; after Robert sneaked to see her, he was savagely beaten and Truth never saw him again. She eventually married an older enslaved man named Thomas and bore five children: James (died in childhood), Diana (result of rape by Dumont), Peter, Elizabeth, and Sophia. In late 1826, Truth escaped to freedom with her infant daughter Sophia, walking to the home of Isaac and Maria Van Wagenen in New Paltz. Learning her son Peter had been illegally sold to Alabama, she sued his new owner Solomon Gedney and won his return in 1828, becoming one of the first Black women to go to court against a white man and win. In 1843, on Pentecost Sunday, June 1, she changed her name to Sojourner Truth, saying 'The Spirit calls me, and I must go,' and began traveling and preaching. She joined the Northampton Association of Education and Industry in Florence, Massachusetts in 1844, an abolitionist-founded community where she met William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, and David Ruggles.

Reader's Guide

Sojourner Truth's significance lies in her intersectional activism at a time when, as biographer Nell Irvin Painter wrote, 'most Americans thought of slaves as male and women as white.' Her 1851 speech at the Ohio Women's Convention, later titled 'Ain't I a Woman?', became widely known during the Civil War, though the published version used a stereotypical Black dialect more commonly spoken in the South—Truth herself grew up speaking Dutch and spoke English with a Dutch accent. During the Civil War, she helped recruit Black men into the Union army; after the war, she tried unsuccessfully to secure land grants from the federal government for formerly enslaved people (summarized as the promise of 'forty acres and a mule'). A memorial bust of Truth was unveiled in 2009 in Emancipation Hall in the U.S. Capitol Visitor Center, making her the first African American woman to have a statue in the Capitol building. In 2014, Smithsonian magazine included her in its list of the '100 Most Significant Americans of All Time.'

Did You Know?

• Truth's first language was Dutch, and she spoke English with a Dutch accent for the rest of her life, not a Southern Black dialect.
• She was sold at auction at age nine with a flock of sheep for $100.
• In 1828, she became one of the first Black women to win a court case against a white man, suing to recover her son Peter who had been illegally sold to Alabama.
• She gave herself the name Sojourner Truth on Pentecost Sunday, June 1, 1843, saying 'The Spirit calls me, and I must go.'
• A memorial bust of Truth was unveiled in 2009 in Emancipation Hall at the U.S. Capitol Visitor Center, making her the first African American woman with a statue in the Capitol building.