Sojourner Truth (ca. 1797–1883), abolitionist, feminist, and Pentecostal preacher.Sojourner Truth was born a slave named Isabella in Ulster County in New York's Hudson River valley. During her enslavement, Isabella married and bore five children. Emancipated by a New York State law passed in 1828, she embraced a “perfectionist” (Pentecostal)
Methodism. She also sued successfully for the return of Peter, her young son, who had been illegally sold into
slavery in Alabama.
Moving with Peter to
New York City in 1828, Isabella joined the utopian religious community “Kingdom of the Prophet Matthias (Robert Matthews)” for a time in the early 1830s. On 1 June 1843, Pentecost Sunday, at the height of the Millerite adventist movement, wherein William Miller had predicted Christ's second coming in 1843–1844, the voice of the Holy Spirit told her she was Sojourner Truth, itinerant preacher. That winter, Truth settled in an industrial commune, the Northampton Association in Massachusetts. There she imbibed
feminism and abolitionism, met William Lloyd
Garrison and Frederick
Douglass, and dictated the
Narrative of Sojourner Truth. Between 1850 and 1864, Truth frequently participated in feminist and
antislavery meetings. She spoke at an Akron, Ohio, women's rights meeting in 1851 but—contrary to later accounts—did
not ask, “Ar'n’t I a woman?”
Truth saw the
Civil War as a kind of Armageddon struggle remaking American society. She embraced political action (which, as a Garrisonian, she had earlier repudiated), and in 1864 campaigned for Abraham
Lincoln's reelection. After the war she championed woman suffrage. Truth died in Battle Creek, Michigan, where she lived with her two surviving daughters.
See also
African American Religion;
African Americans;
Antebellum Era;
Millennialism and Apocalypticism;
Pentecostalism;
Utopian and Communitarian Movements;
Woman Suffrage Movement;
Women's Rights Movements.
Bibliography
Nell Irvin Painter , Sojourner Truth, A Life, A Symbol, 1996.
Nell Irvin Painter, ed., Narrative of Sojourner Truth, 1998.
Nell Irvin Painter
