Before Susan B. Anthony, Rosa Parks, and Maggie Kuhn, there was Sojourner Truth. Today she’d be called a badass with brass balls. In her own time she was known as a “fiery abolitionist” and a “riveting preacher” with a straight-talking, unsentimental style.

She was born Isabella Baumfree into slavery in 1797 near present-day Rifton and Esopus, New York. Sold repeatedly—once even bundled with sheep as part of a package deal—she escaped in 1826 by walking away from her enslaver’s farm, a year before New York’s emancipation law took effect. But that was only the beginning of an extraordinary life.

In 1828 she won a landmark court case to free her son Peter, becoming the first Black woman to successfully challenge a white man in a U.S. court. She later moved to New York City, became deeply involved in evangelical religious communities, and gained recognition for her preaching. In 1843 she felt called by God to travel as an itinerant preacher and adopted the name Sojourner Truth.

Here in Western Massachusetts, we take particular pride in her time in Northampton, where she joined the Northampton Association of Education and Industry, a utopian community committed to racial, gender, and economic equality. The community operated a silk factory where Truth lived in the boarding house and served as director of the laundry.

During her fourteen years in the Valley, she met leading abolitionists and activists such as William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass, with whom she later collaborated on speaking tours advocating for the end of slavery and for women’s rights.

Her sharp wit and charismatic presence made her a sought-after figure on the 19th-century lecture circuit. Today she'd be called an influencer and a public intellectual. She campaigned relentlessly for abolition, women’s suffrage, and welfare for the elderly and formerly enslaved, all while carefully managing her public image. She was among the first public figures to use self-publishing and the new technology of photography to shape her own narrative.

For Sojourner Truth, personal agency was a form of spiritual and social liberation. She taught and embodied the idea that standing up for your rights, and for the rights of all, awakens a joy, purpose, and dignity that no external force can extinguish.

"During her lifetime, Truth was savvy about her own image. She commissioned photographs of herself when the visual technology was in its infancy and sold picture cards with the astute slogan, 'I sell the shadow to support the substance.'

"Critics derided her as a 'negro wench' and mocked her insights as ridiculous pretense. But Truth was an effective lecturer on the abolitionist circuit. As her renown increased, the media amassed a vast collection of anecdotes, brimming with rhetorical brilliance. Her very quotability and array of interests were both her boon and her bane. It’s hard to capture the breadth of a woman who straddled various movements for decades."

ARTICLE: The Remarkable Untold Story of Sojourner Truth

MEMOIR: The Narrative of Sojourner Truth by Olive Gilbert and Sojourner Truth

‍