Sojourner Truth

Auctioned at nine along with a flock of sheep, for one hundred dollars. That was Isabella Bomefree's introduction to the market — sold away from her parents to John Neely near Kingston, then on to a tavern keeper for 105 dollars two years after that, then in 1810 to John Dumont. She had spoken only Dutch until the first sale. She married an enslaved man named Thomas and bore five children, one of them fathered by Dumont. In 1828, using the surname of the Quaker family that had sheltered her, she went into the New York courts against a white man named Solomon Gedney, who had sold her five-year-old son Peter south into Alabama. She won, and the boy came back.

On Pentecost Sunday in 1843 she renamed herself and started walking. What came of the next 30 years is a public career of unusual reach: the Narrative she dictated to Olive Gilbert in 1850, the Northampton commune in Massachusetts, the Akron convention, the recruiting of Black soldiers for the Union Army, the Washington streetcars, the land petitions Congress buried. BriefHistory carries that record. This page is about what sat underneath it — the son, the sect, and the fact that she never wrote a word of her own.

She had won Peter back in court and then lost him anyway. In 1839 he shipped out on the Nantucket whaler Zone. Three of his letters reached her over the next two years, and in one of them he said he had sent five and had none in return. When the ship docked in 1842 he was not aboard, and nobody ever learned what became of him. Six years before that she had handed her savings and her furniture to Robert Matthews, a bearded man who called himself the Prophet Matthias, and in 1834 the state charged them both with the murder of a member of the household named Elijah Pierson. They were acquitted for want of evidence. She left the following year.

She died at her Battle Creek house on the morning of November 26, 1883, and a thousand people came to the funeral. Then the symbol went to work on the woman — her biographer Nell Irvin Painter spent a book prising the two apart. The physical honors piled up regardless: a Black Heritage stamp in 1986, the rover that rolled off the Pathfinder lander in 1997 carrying her name, a bronze bust in Emancipation Hall in 2009, the first of a Black woman anywhere in the Capitol, a monument in Central Park in 2020, a state park near her birthplace in 2022. The 10-dollar bill announced in 2016 has not appeared.

Sojourner Truth's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Suit against Solomon Gedney case
  She sued to recover her son Peter from Alabama and won 1828
• The Narrative of Sojourner Truth: a Northern Slave book
  Dictated to Olive Gilbert and printed privately by William Lloyd Garrison 1850
• Address to the Akron women's rights convention speech
  Reported that June by Marius Robinson in the Anti-Slavery Bugle 1851
• I Sell the Shadow to Support the Substance artwork
  Cartes-de-visite of herself, sold to pay off the mortgage on her house 1854
• Petition for western land grants to freedpeople other
  She pressed Congress for seven years and got nothing 1870

• 1806 aged ~9 Sold at auction with a flock of sheep for 100 dollars She was nine and spoke only Dutch. Two more sales followed within four years.
• Late 1826 aged ~29 Walks away from John Dumont with her infant daughter Sophia
• July 4, 1827 aged 29 New York emancipation takes full effect Isaac Van Wagenen had already bought her last year of service for 20 dollars.
• 1828 aged ~31 Sues Solomon Gedney and recovers her son Peter Among the first Black women in America to take a white man to court and win.
• 1834 aged ~37 Charged with the murder of Elijah Pierson and acquitted She had given her savings and furniture to the sect run by the Prophet Matthias.
• June 1, 1843 aged 45 Renames herself Sojourner Truth on Pentecost Sunday
• 1850 aged ~53 The Narrative appears and she buys a house in Florence for 300 dollars
• October 1864 aged 67 Meets Abraham Lincoln at the White House
• November 26, 1883 aged 86 Dies at her home on College Street in Battle Creek

• Frederick Douglass 1818–1895
  Former slave who became a leading abolitionist, orator, and advocate for equal rights. eulogized by
• William Lloyd Garrison 1805–1879
  Editor of The Liberator and founder of the American Anti-Slavery Society. published her Narrative
• Abraham Lincoln 1809–1865
  16th President who preserved the Union during the Civil War and issued the Emancipation Proclamation. met at the White House
• Elizabeth Cady Stanton 1815–1902
  Principal theorist and organizer of the nineteenth-century women’s rights and suffrage movements. shared the suffrage platform
• Rosa Parks 1913–2005
  Civil rights activist whose refusal to give up her bus seat sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott. took the streetcar fight further
• Harriet Tubman 1822–1913
  Abolitionist who escaped slavery and led hundreds to freedom via the Underground Railroad. commemorated alongside her