Previous Challenge Entry (Level 4 – Masters)
Topic: GIANTS (10/22/20)
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TITLE: Sojourner Truth - Bigger Than Life | Previous Challenge Entry
By Jack Taylor
10/29/20 -
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Her name elevates her as one of the most powerful human rights advocates in the nineteenth century. Isabella Baumfree was born into a family of slaves owned by a Dutch American named Johannes Hardenbergh. When her master died, she was sold, along with a flock of sheep, for $100. She would be bought and sold several more times. The New York Anti-Slavery Law of 1827 was looming into existence when her owner ignored a promise of freedom. She walked away from the beatings and cruelty, taking her infant daughter, and was converted to a faith that would change history. In 1843, on Pentecost Sunday in a Methodist service, she changed her name to Sojourner Truth.
This firebrand got involved in the antislavery movement and then the women’s rights movement. In 1851, in Akron, Ohio, she gave the speech, “Ain’t I a Woman.” It is one of the most famous abolitionist and women’s rights speeches in American history. In that speech, she is reported to have said “I have borne thirteen children and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me? And ain’t I a woman?” She carried herself with so much force and competence that some questioned whether she really was a woman.
A man objected that since Christ was a man, women didn’t have the same rights as men. Her response. “Where did your Christ come from? From God and a woman! Man had nothing to do with Him.” She was the first black woman to win her son back from a white slave owner in a court of law. In an age when black women were largely invisible to the influencers of the age, Sojourner proved she was more than an aberration.
She took on the name Sojourner Truth because she was convinced God had called her to testify to the hope within her. Over the years she drifted from group to group and made her presence felt. She demanded equal rights for women and blacks. During the Civil War, she helped recruit black troops for the Union Army and worked to try and get land grants from the government for formerly enslaved people.
She is the first African American woman with a statue in the Capital Building and is included by the Smithsonian as one of the “100 Most Significant Americans of All Time.” Truth spoke before hundreds of audiences and in 1853 was featured at the Broadway Tabernacle in New York. In 1858, after again being accused of being a man, Truth undid her blouse and proved she was not a man. She endured her share of hisses but in 1867, at the American Equal Rights Association, she received loud cheers. By New Year’s Day, 1871, a standing room only crowd welcomed her.
She told the audience that she had once hated white men because of the cruel masters who abused her. This continued until she met her final master, Jesus, who changed her heart to love everyone. She also advocated for free land out west for the emancipated blacks who were forced to live off the government welfare. In October 1864, she met President Abraham Lincoln. The following year she boarded streetcars in Washington to help force desegregation. In 1872 she met President Ulysses S. Grant in the White House and then returned to Battle Creek, Michigan where she tried to vote without success.
Abolition, Women’s rights and finally prison reform were the tracks for her message. She added anti-capital punishment. One thousand people attended the funeral service of a former slave from New York. The State of Michigan named Interstate Highway 194 the Sojourner Truth Downtown Parkway. A twelve-foot bronze statue of this giant of a woman is set in Monument Park in Battle Creek. On August 26, 2020, celebrating the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment, another statue of Sojourner Truth was unveiled in Central Park in New York City.
Truth is a monumental figure for our times when the world is wrestling once again with racism.
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