Sojourner Truth, a woman, in her own words

The life and legacy of one of history’s most famous abolitionists, Sojourner Truth, a former slave who spent her life evangelizing and rallying for a collection of causes is often condensed to four words “Ain’t I a Woman?”

But that rendering of her speech, where Truth’s words are written with a Southern dialect is not an accurate portrayal of what Truth, who grew up in Dutch-speaking Ulster County, New York, would have sounded like, historian and author of “Sojourner Truth: A Life, a Symbol,” Nell Irvin Painter told The Advance.

Painter and many other historians assert that the speech, as it’s recited in popular culture today, was incorrectly recorded by white journalist and abolitionist, Frances Dana Gage, which was published twelve years after Truth spoke at the Woman’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio in May of 1851.

And by the time Gage’s version of the “Ain’t I a Woman” speech became well known in the 20th century during second-wave feminism in the 1960s, Painter said American activists and culture demanded “authenticity” from Black people which erroneously dictated that Truth be a Southerner. 

“It’s such a crime that this person who was so thoughtful and so eloquent and so powerful a speaker should be reduced to a slogan,” Painter said. “I would like to abolish the sound bite, then I would like people to go beyond this sound bite.”

Truth was a gifted preacher and a stalwart defender of human rights, whether that meant women’s rights, temperance or abolitionism, she had a voice and she used it, Painter said.

And she utilized emerging technology to further her causes, selling photographs of herself when the technology was fairly new that had the inscription “I Sell the Shadow to Support the Substance“.

“It’s a picture of power. It’s not a fashionable picture, but it’s very composed and she decided how she wanted to be seen in those photographs. That’s the closest I could get to her self presentation,” Painter said.

Though she never learned to read or write, Truth dictated her life story to a friend who wrote her autobiography, for which she used the proceeds to travel around the country captivating audiences with her powerful speeches, Painter said.

Truth speaks at the Michigan Capitol

In the later years of Truth’s life, she put down roots in Michigan in the Battle Creek area, but that’s not necessarily common knowledge throughout the state, Michigan Capitol Historian Valerie Marvin told Michigan Advance.

“Truth is understood to be a national figure, and we often don’t think about where national figures live, because we just imagine them forever traveling across the country,” Marvin said. 

But Truth was a prominent political figure in Michigan who had become a legend by the time she started being asked to speak at the Michigan State Capitol on various topics, Marvin said.

There aren’t any known photographs from Truth’s June 2, 1881 speech from the state House rostrum in the Michigan Capitol condemning efforts to reinstate the death penalty, but by that time Truth had acquired such notoriety and intrigue that likely the chamber was filled with elected officials, capitol staff and members of the public to hear the famous speaker, then in her 80s, just two years before the end of her life.

It would be another decade before Michigan would have its first Black state lawmaker serving in the room Truth spoke in, but Marvin illustrates that there would have been plenty of Black individuals working in the chamber and around the Capitol, along with Black residents in the area that would have eagerly come to hear Truth speak.

An article published by the Lansing Republican five days after Truth’s speech offers its telling of her words where she opens by thanking God that despite all she may have been deprived of in life, she is still alive to call on her fellow Michiganders to maintain the abolishment of the death penalty, which Michigan had been the first state to abolish in 1846.

“When I had thought for so many years that I lived in the most blessed state of the union, and then to think of its being made the awful scene of hanging people by the neck until they are dead. Where is the man or woman who can sanction such a thing as that?,” the article quotes Truth saying. “We are the makers of murderers if we do it.”

The portion of this speech that jumps out to Marvin as a hallmark of Truth’s willingness to speak her mind is early in Truth’s speech she says the idea that lawmakers were considering a bill to reinstate the death penalty jarred her so much that it “shocked” her “worse than slavery”.

“I think in Michigan, we think of the death penalty as something that’s kind of been dealt with because we’ve been talking about it for so long, going back to the 1840s, but I’m sure for many people who saw slavery as the penultimate issue of their day… there would have been eyes that would have gone wide,” Marvin said.

And though like her famous 1851 speech in Ohio, where history is largely at the mercy of the news articles written at the time, Marvin said she would like to think that the articles she’s reviewed, written in standard English, may be closer to reality, but ultimately no one knows.

“I think regardless of if she had a Dutch accent, regardless of the grammar she used, regardless of individual words she chose from one talk to another, she lived her convictions, and she dedicated her life to sharing those convictions with others,” Marvin said.

What Truth was able to do and say was unheard of, she was a power that demanded to be heard in a government for which she was not given a voice, Marvin said. And though it’s incredibly frustrating that Truth and many other great speakers who have given speeches in the state Capitol may not have their words 100% accurately recorded, Truth should not be relegated to one speech.

“Every person speaks within the context of their life, and your speech is just an audible declaration of something that you feel is worth saying. But how can you really tell who a person is? It’s not just by what comes out of their mouth, but how they live, and when you think about the decades that she invested in trying to educate people, in trying to preach to people, in trying to bring people around to what she saw as positive reforms, her life exemplified that movement,” Marvin said.

Truth’s is just one story of formerly enslaved individuals who utilized their story to call on the powers that be to change what was, but her presence in history is one of such elegance that it demands to be told in the full color for which Truth lived it, Painter said.

And the world is ready to look past the “sound bite” of the “Ain’t I a Woman” speech and delve deeper into who Truth and other Black voices of the 19th century were, Painter said. Recent pushback on diversity, equity and inclusion education and policies may make the curious of mind all the more curious about her story.

“Even when we think of how terrible our country can be, how terrible our times can be. We can take heart knowing that there were ordinary people who you look at them and you think, ‘oh, this person has no power’, yet those people empowered themselves,” Painter said. “ So you can see places in what looks like a totally impossible balance of power and you can see how people can get through. I find that very encouraging, that people can’t be dismissed…to go beyond what their situation condemns them to.”