Sojourner truth summary biography

Sojourner Truth Meets Abraham Lincoln—On Equal Ground. In 1829, she moved to New York City, where she worked as a domestic, preached, joined a religious commune, and then in 1843 had an epiphany.

When Van Wagenen refused to surrender Baumfree, the two men brokered an agreement for Van Wagenen to pay Dumont twenty dollars for Baumfree’s services until the effective date of New York’s mandated manumission. In return, Truth filed a successful lawsuit that cost the conductor his job and compelled the streetcar company to enforce the desegregation decree.

Progressive Spokesperson

In 1867, Truth returned to Michigan.

The 19th Century revivalist movement aimed at redressing the evils of society before the expected second coming of Jesus Christ.

Murder Suspect

Baumfree’s newly found religious fervor prompted her to move to New York City with her son, Peter, in 1829. For the next sixteen years, she continued to travel extensively throughout the country promoting equality for blacks, women’s rights, universal suffrage, and prison reform.

Possibly the greatest disappointment of her final years was her inability to convince the federal government to provide former slaves with free homesteads in the West so they could become self-supporting.

On June 21, 1851, two days after the event, Marius Robinson, an abolitionist and newspaper editor who served as the convention’s recording secretary, published a transcription of the speech in his abolitionist newspaper, the Anti-Slavery Bugle. By 1854, proceeds from the work enabled her to pay off the mortgage.

She sold her house in Harmonia and moved to Battle Creek, converting the Merritt barn on College Street into her new home. And did not the same Savior die to save the one as well as the other?”

Sojourner Truth: Ain’t I A Woman? Truth's awakening during nineteenth-century America's progressive surge then propelled her ascendancy as a rousing preacher and political orator despite her inability to read and write.

Still, when a large group of freedmen migrated to Kansas in 1879, she traveled there to help them settle, despite her advanced age.

Death of Sojourner Truth

In 1883, Truth’s age and grueling life caught up with her. In 1829, she moved to New York City with Peter to work as a housekeeper for evangelist preacher Elijah Pierson.

She left Pierson three years later to work for another preacher, Robert Matthews.

She was the second youngest of James and Betsey Baumfree’s ten to twelve children. Truth was, in fact, a proud New Yorker.

There is little doubt, nonetheless, that Truth's speech—and many others she gave throughout her adult life—moved audiences. Where did Christ come from? During the 1870s, Truth’s friend and informal manager Frances Titus released a second edition of the book, adding the “Book of Life,” a collection of essays, articles, and letters from Truth’s admirers.

Her grave marker lists Truth’s age as “about 105 years,” but her actual age at the time of her death was more likely shy of ninety years.

Sojourner Truth’s Legacy

More than a century after her death, in 2009, Truth became the first black woman honored with a bust in the U.S.

Capitol. She was the first Black woman to sue a white man in a United States court and prevail.

The Van Wagenens had a profound impact on Isabella’s spirituality and she became a fervent Christian.

Born into bondage among the Hudson Valley Dutch in Ulster County, New York, Isabella was sold several times, married, and bore five children before fleeing in 1826 with her infant daughter one year before New York slavery was abolished. She died at her home in Battle Creek on November 26 of unreported causes.