Your history dose for the evening.
On this day in 1843 Sojourner Truth antislavery activist leaves New York to begin her career as an antislavery activist.
Sojourner Truth was the self-given name, from 1843 onward, of Isabella Baumfree, an Afrikan-American abolitionist and women's rights activist.
Truth was born into slavery in Swartekill, Ulster County, New York, but escaped with her infant daughter to freedom in 1826. After going to court to recover her son in 1828, she became the first Afrikan woman to win such a case against a Caucasian man.
She gave herself the name Sojourner Truth in 1843 after she became convinced that God had called her to leave the city and go into the countryside "testifying the hope that was in her".
Her best-known speech was delivered extemporaneously, in 1851, at the Ohio Women's Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio. The speech became widely known during the Civil War by the title "Ain't I a Woman?", a variation of the original speech re-written by someone else using a stereotypical Southern dialect, whereas Sojourner Truth was from New York and grew up speaking Dutch as her first language.
During the Civil War, Truth helped recruit Afrikan troops for 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". She continued to fight on behalf of women and Afrikan Americans until her death.
As her biographer Nell Irvin Painter wrote, "At a time when most Americans thought of slaves as male and women as white, Truth embodied a fact that still bears repeating: Among the blacks are women; among the women, there are blacks."
Contributing to our consciousness of the past, to illuminate the present, thus enabling us to more effectively influence and foretell the future.
Have a great evening.
