Sojourner Truth
Formerly enslaved African-American abolitionist, preacher, and women's rights advocate.
Sojourner Truth was one of the most influential voices in 19th-century American Christianity, an African-American abolitionist, preacher, and women's rights advocate whose preaching and prayer shaped both the abolitionist movement and the early women's rights movement. Born Isabella Baumfree around 1797 to enslaved parents in the Dutch-speaking community of Swartekill, New York, she was sold multiple times during her childhood and young adulthood and bore at least five children, several of whom were sold away from her. She escaped to freedom with her infant daughter in 1826, a year before New York's gradual emancipation law took effect for her age cohort, and shortly after won a landmark legal case for the return of her son Peter, who had been illegally sold into slavery in Alabama (one of the first such cases brought by a Black woman against a white man in American history). In 1843, she experienced a religious conversion she described as a direct call from God, took the name Sojourner Truth, and began traveling and preaching across the northern United States. Over the next forty years she became one of the most powerful preachers of the American antebellum period, an organizer of African-American military units during the Civil War, and a tireless advocate for women's suffrage and African-American civil rights. Her most famous speech, the 'Ain't I a Woman?' address delivered at the Women's Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio in 1851, remains one of the foundational texts of American feminism. Her Narrative, dictated to Olive Gilbert and published in 1850, preserves substantial portions of her actual speech and prayer. She died at her home in Battle Creek, Michigan, on November 26, 1883.
This is the traditional attribution; modern scholarship is divided. See the prayer page for details.