She was born into slavery, freed herself, then asked a nation what it meant to work and not be paid.
Sojourner Truth was born Isabella Baumfree around 1797 in Ulster County, New York, enslaved under Dutch colonial law. She was sold at least three times before the age of thirteen. In 1826, she escaped with her infant daughter to the home of the Van Wagenen family, a year before New York’s gradual emancipation law freed her.1
In 1828, she became one of the first Black women in the United States to successfully sue a white man, winning back her son Peter, who had been illegally sold into slavery in Alabama.2
She took the name Sojourner Truth in 1843 and began traveling as an itinerant preacher. Her speeches connected the experience of enslaved labor to the wider struggle for human dignity. At a women’s rights convention in Akron, Ohio, in 1851, she reportedly delivered a speech challenging the exclusion of Black women from both the abolitionist and suffragist movements.3
Her argument was rooted in physical labor. She had plowed fields, hauled loads, and borne thirteen children, most of whom were sold away from her. The labor she performed was identical to men’s labor, yet the rights granted to white women and to men were denied to her.
During the Civil War, Truth recruited Black troops for the Union Army and worked to secure land and employment for freed people. After the war, she petitioned Congress for land grants to formerly enslaved people, arguing that decades of unpaid labor had created a moral debt the government owed.4
Truth never learned to read or write. Her 1850 autobiography, The Narrative of Sojourner Truth, was dictated to Olive Gilbert and published with help from William Lloyd Garrison.5 She died in Battle Creek, Michigan, on November 26, 1883. Her life embodied the question that the industrial labor system spent the next century avoiding: what happens when the people who perform the hardest work receive the least in return.