50 Fun Facts About Sojourner Truth

Which language did New York-born Sojourner Truth speak exclusively until about the age of nine?

Dutch was her only language as a child on a settler family's estate in Ulster County, and she kept the accent for the rest of her life.

At about age nine, Sojourner Truth was sold at auction for $100 in a single lot with what?

A flock of sheep was part of the same sale to John Neely near Kingston, New York. She later recalled him as a cruel master who beat her daily.

Which world did NASA's Sojourner rover, named for Sojourner Truth in a student essay contest, explore in 1997?

Mars got its first working rover that summer, when the six-wheeled Sojourner rolled off the Pathfinder lander. Valerie Ambroise, a 12-year-old from Connecticut, wrote the winning essay.

In which Ohio city did Sojourner Truth give her best-known speech, at an 1851 women's rights convention?

Akron hosted the two-day convention at its Old Stone Church, and she spoke on the second day. The city opened a Sojourner Truth Legacy Plaza with her statue in 2024.

Which magazine co-founded by Gloria Steinem was almost named Sojourner, after Sojourner Truth?

Ms. got its title only after Sojourner was dropped because people took it for a travel magazine, Steinem recalled. Its first stand-alone issue appeared in 1972.

Sojourner Truth told the enslaver she left in 1826 that she had not run off but had done what?

Walked away by daylight was how she put it, after John Dumont broke his promise to free her a year ahead of state law. She carried her infant daughter Sophia with her.

Working in Washington in 1865, Sojourner Truth insisted on riding what to help force their desegregation?

Streetcars were legally open to Black riders by then, but conductors often refused to stop. One who wrenched her shoulder trying to put her off was taken to court and lost his job.

Which president showed Sojourner Truth a Bible given to him by the Black community of Baltimore?

Abraham Lincoln received her at the White House on October 29, 1864, while she was working with freed people in Washington. Artist Frank Courter later painted the scene.

What did Sojourner Truth sell under the motto about selling the shadow to support the substance?

Photos of herself, sold as small cards at her lectures, raised money for her work. The shadow was the image, and the substance was the living woman it helped to feed.

Where in New York City does a 2020 monument show Sojourner Truth with Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton?

Central Park had no statue of a real woman until this one. The first design showed only Anthony and Stanton, and Truth was added after critics objected to the absence of women of color.

Which convention chair published the best-known version of Sojourner Truth's 1851 speech twelve years later?

Frances Gage wrote her account from memory in 1863, adding the refrain that gave the speech its title. The transcript printed weeks after the convention does not contain that question.

The famous 1863 version of Sojourner Truth's speech put which way of speaking into the New Yorker's mouth?

A Southern dialect runs through the 1863 text, though she was born and raised in New York. The transcript printed a few weeks after the speech shows nothing of the kind.

Sojourner Truth said in 1851 that if which biblical woman upset the world, women could set it right?

Eve caused man to sin, she had heard from the Bible, since she could not read it herself. Her reply turned that old charge into a reason to give women a chance.

Which two measures did Sojourner Truth use in 1851 to compare a woman's intellect with a man's?

A pint and a quart were her terms: even if a woman's mind held the smaller measure, why not let her have it full? Rights, she added, could not overfill it.

Sojourner Truth asked men in 1851 where which figure came from, answering God and a woman?

Jesus came into the world through God and the woman who bore him, she said, then asked what part man had played. By the later account, a minister had argued from the manhood of Christ.

In the famous version of her speech, Sojourner Truth mocks a man's claim that women must be helped into what?

Carriages come first in his list of courtesies, followed by being lifted over ditches. Nobody had ever offered her either, she replies, before asking the question that became the speech's title.

Which poet performed Sojourner Truth's famous speech on the 1999 cast recording of the musical The Civil War?

Maya Angelou delivered it as a spoken-word track on the album. Frank Wildhorn's musical, which reached Broadway that year, uses an abridged version of the speech.

Which Ohio newspaper editor, a friend of Sojourner Truth, printed the first full transcript of her 1851 speech?

Marius Robinson was the convention's recording secretary and went over his text with her before printing it that June. It never contains the question the speech is now named for.

Which English potter made the anti-slavery medallion whose motto Sojourner Truth's famous question echoes?

Josiah Wedgwood's 1787 medallion showed a kneeling man in chains asking whether he was not a man and a brother. British abolitionists recast the line for women in the 1820s, three decades before she spoke.

Which historian's 1996 biography of Sojourner Truth showed that the famous version of her speech was unreliable?

Nell Irvin Painter's Sojourner Truth: A Life, a Symbol sent historians back to the transcript printed in 1851. After retiring from Princeton she went to art school and earned a master's in painting.

By which first name was Sojourner Truth known for some four decades before she renamed herself in 1843?

Isabella was her name through slavery and her first years of freedom in New York City. As a child she was known simply as Belle.

Sojourner Truth sued in 1828 after her five-year-old son was illegally sold into which distant slave state?

Alabama lay far beyond New York, whose law barred such sales out of state. She got Peter back, becoming one of the first Black women to beat a white man in court.

New York freed its last enslaved adults, months after Sojourner Truth left bondage, on which date in 1827?

July 4 was set by an 1817 law for everyone born before that day in 1799. Her enslaver had promised to release her a year sooner, then went back on his word.

Setting out from New York City in 1843 to preach, Sojourner Truth packed her few belongings in what?

A pillowcase held all she took when she left the city that June, on the day she adopted her new name. She told friends the Spirit was calling her and she had to go.

Sojourner Truth's son Peter vanished in the early 1840s after taking a job aboard what kind of vessel?

A whaling ship out of Nantucket, the Zone, took him on in 1839. She received three letters from him, but he was not aboard when it came home in 1842, and she never heard from him again.

Which formerly enslaved orator, whom Sojourner Truth met at a Massachusetts commune, later eulogized her?

Frederick Douglass praised her insight into human nature and her courageous self-assertion. The two had sparred for decades: she once stopped him in mid-speech by asking whether God was dead.

Which editor of The Liberator privately published the Narrative of Sojourner Truth in 1850?

William Lloyd Garrison knew her from the Northampton community in Massachusetts. She sold the book at her lectures, and the proceeds helped pay off her first home.

Which best-selling author dubbed Sojourner Truth 'the Libyan Sibyl' in an 1863 profile for the Atlantic Monthly?

Harriet Beecher Stowe built the essay on a visit Truth had paid her about a decade earlier. It spread her fame nationwide, and a marble statue by William Wetmore Story carries the same title.

In which Michigan city did Sojourner Truth make her home for her last decades and die in 1883?

Battle Creek and nearby Harmonia were home to reformers she knew from the lecture circuit. Nearly a thousand people attended her funeral, and a 12-foot bronze of her now stands in the city.

As a Michigan homeowner in her seventies, Sojourner Truth was refused in 1872 when she tried to do what?

Cast a ballot is what she tried to do twice that November: first before her ward's registration board, then at the polls on election day. Both refused her.

Which president did Sojourner Truth meet at the White House in 1870 and campaign to re-elect two years later?

Ulysses S. Grant signed her autograph album, the Book of Life, during the visit. She joked afterwards that he was in a dreadful hurry to put down his name.

Sojourner Truth's grandson James Caldwell joined which Black regiment, later the subject of the film Glory?

The 54th Massachusetts is best remembered for its 1863 assault on Fort Wagner. She helped recruit Black soldiers for the Union and is credited with a marching song for a Michigan regiment.

After the Civil War, Sojourner Truth spent years petitioning Congress to give formerly enslaved people what?

Western land, she argued, would let freed people crowded into Washington support themselves instead of living on government aid. She pursued the idea for seven years without success.

The Massachusetts utopian community Sojourner Truth joined in 1844 supported itself by making which fabric?

Silk came from a factory the abolitionist community ran beside its sawmill and gristmill. She oversaw the laundry there, supervising men as well as women.

Sojourner Truth preached in 1843 at camp meetings of which movement that expected the world to end soon?

Millerites followed William Miller of New York and turned out in large crowds to hear her preach and sing. When the predicted day passed, she kept her distance from them for a time.

Which self-proclaimed prophet led the New York commune that Sojourner Truth joined as a housekeeper in the 1830s?

Robert Matthews, a carpenter who called himself the Prophet Matthias, ran a household known as the Kingdom. It broke up in scandal in 1835, and she cleared her own name in court.

Sojourner Truth never learned to read or write, so which friend took down her life story for publication?

Olive Gilbert met her at the Northampton community and wrote the Narrative in the third person, adding comments of her own. Her text still filled the first 125 pages when the book was reissued in 1875.

In which Massachusetts city did Sojourner Truth address the first National Women's Rights Convention in 1850?

Worcester hosted the gathering a year before her better-known Ohio speech. In the same year she bought her first house and saw her life story into print.

Which practice did Sojourner Truth preach against when she went before the Michigan Legislature?

Capital punishment joined abolition, women's rights, temperance and prison reform on the long list of causes she took up from the lecture platform.

In 2009 Sojourner Truth became the first Black woman honored with a sculpture in which Washington building?

The U.S. Capitol unveiled Artis Lane's bronze bust in its visitor center's Emancipation Hall. The National Congress of Black Women had raised money for it over many years.

In 2016 the U.S. Treasury announced that Sojourner Truth would appear on the back of which redesigned banknote?

$10 notes were to show her alongside Lucretia Mott, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Alice Paul, with a scene from the 1913 suffrage procession in Washington.

The Navy oiler USNS Sojourner Truth belongs to a class of ships named after which civil rights leader?

John Lewis, the civil rights leader and longtime congressman, gave his name to the lead ship. The Navy said in 2016 that the rest of the class would honor civil and human rights figures.

Sojourner Truth State Park, dedicated in 2022 near her birthplace, lies along which New York river?

The Hudson bounds the park's east side just north of Kingston. The site once held cement works, brickyards and quarries, two of which have flooded into lakes.

Which Judy Chicago installation at the Brooklyn Museum honors Sojourner Truth among 39 famous women?

The Dinner Party gives her a place setting at its triangular table. She is the only Black woman among the guests, a point critics have long raised.

In which New York town is the National Women's Hall of Fame, which inducted Sojourner Truth in 1981?

Seneca Falls hosted the famous 1848 women's rights convention, which she did not attend. A life-sized terracotta statue of her has stood in the national park's visitor center there since 1998.

In which city did violence erupt in 1942 as Black families moved into the Sojourner Truth housing project?

Detroit saw supporters and opponents fill the streets by the thousands that February. Forty people were injured and 220 arrested, and nearly everyone held for trial was Black.

Which visiting leader received a statue of Sojourner Truth from New York Governor Mario Cuomo in 1990?

Nelson Mandela was touring the United States a few months after his release from prison. The two-foot figure was the work of New York sculptor Ruth Inge Hardison.

Which university named apartments for Sojourner Truth because its first president's kin had enslaved her family?

Rutgers, founded as Queen's College, had Jacob Hardenbergh as its first president. His brother's household held Truth and her parents on its Ulster County estate.

Which New York museum holds The Libyan Sibyl, the marble statue that Sojourner Truth's story inspired?

The Met was given William Wetmore Story's marble in 1979. It was shown at London's international exhibition of 1862.

Which SUNY campus, in the town where Sojourner Truth first lived free, named its library for her?

New Paltz was home to Isaac and Maria Van Wagenen, who took her in with her baby in 1826 and paid her former owner $20 for the rest of her year's labor. The college library took her name in 1971.