Sojourner Truth
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50 free Sojourner Truth trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Sojourner Truth was born into slavery in rural Ulster County around 1797, escaped with her infant daughter, and became one of the most compelling speakers of the nineteenth century. She took on slaveholders, hecklers, courts and presidents, and never learned to read a word of the newspapers that reported her. This quiz covers her whole story: childhood and escape, the lawsuit that made legal history, the name she took in midlife, and above all the 1851 convention speech remembered as "Ain't I a Woman?". Several questions look at what she actually said that day, how the famous version came to be written, and why historians now trust a different text. It also follows her later years as a preacher, Civil War recruiter and campaigner for freed people, and the tributes that keep her name alive today. It is written for students studying the speech, teachers planning a Black history or women's history lesson, and anyone curious about the real woman behind the legend.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which language did New York-born Sojourner Truth speak exclusively until about the age of nine?
Dutch
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.
Q 02At about age nine, Sojourner Truth was sold at auction for $100 in a single lot with what?
A flock of sheep
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.
Q 03Which world did NASA's Sojourner rover, named for Sojourner Truth in a student essay contest, explore in 1997?
Mars
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.
Q 04In which Ohio city did Sojourner Truth give her best-known speech, at an 1851 women's rights convention?
Akron
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.
Q 05Which magazine co-founded by Gloria Steinem was almost named Sojourner, after Sojourner Truth?
Ms.
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.
Q 06Sojourner Truth told the enslaver she left in 1826 that she had not run off but had done what?
Walked away
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.
Q 07Working in Washington in 1865, Sojourner Truth insisted on riding what to help force their desegregation?
Streetcars
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.
Q 08Which president showed Sojourner Truth a Bible given to him by the Black community of Baltimore?
Abraham Lincoln
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.
Q 09What did Sojourner Truth sell under the motto about selling the shadow to support the substance?
Photos of herself
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.
Q 10Where in New York City does a 2020 monument show Sojourner Truth with Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton?
Central Park
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.
Q 11Which convention chair published the best-known version of Sojourner Truth's 1851 speech twelve years later?
Frances Gage
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.
Q 12The famous 1863 version of Sojourner Truth's speech put which way of speaking into the New Yorker's mouth?
A Southern dialect
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.
Q 13Sojourner Truth said in 1851 that if which biblical woman upset the world, women could set it right?
Eve
Q 21By which first name was Sojourner Truth known for some four decades before she renamed herself in 1843?
Isabella
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.
Q 22Sojourner Truth sued in 1828 after her five-year-old son was illegally sold into which distant slave state?
Alabama
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.
Q 23New York freed its last enslaved adults, months after Sojourner Truth left bondage, on which date in 1827?
July 4
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.
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.
Q 14Which two measures did Sojourner Truth use in 1851 to compare a woman's intellect with a man's?
A pint and a quart
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.
Q 15Sojourner Truth asked men in 1851 where which figure came from, answering God and a woman?
Jesus
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.
Q 16In the famous version of her speech, Sojourner Truth mocks a man's claim that women must be helped into what?
Carriages
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.
Q 17Which poet performed Sojourner Truth's famous speech on the 1999 cast recording of the musical The Civil War?
Maya Angelou
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.
Q 18Which Ohio newspaper editor, a friend of Sojourner Truth, printed the first full transcript of her 1851 speech?
Marius Robinson
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.
Q 19Which English potter made the anti-slavery medallion whose motto Sojourner Truth's famous question echoes?
Josiah Wedgwood
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.
Q 20Which historian's 1996 biography of Sojourner Truth showed that the famous version of her speech was unreliable?
Nell Irvin Painter
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.
Q 24Setting out from New York City in 1843 to preach, Sojourner Truth packed her few belongings in what?
A pillowcase
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.
Q 25Sojourner Truth's son Peter vanished in the early 1840s after taking a job aboard what kind of vessel?
A whaling ship
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.
Q 26Which formerly enslaved orator, whom Sojourner Truth met at a Massachusetts commune, later eulogized her?
Frederick Douglass
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.
Q 27Which editor of The Liberator privately published the Narrative of Sojourner Truth in 1850?
William Lloyd Garrison
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.
Q 28Which best-selling author dubbed Sojourner Truth 'the Libyan Sibyl' in an 1863 profile for the Atlantic Monthly?
Harriet Beecher Stowe
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.
Q 29In which Michigan city did Sojourner Truth make her home for her last decades and die in 1883?
Battle Creek
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.
Q 30As a Michigan homeowner in her seventies, Sojourner Truth was refused in 1872 when she tried to do what?
Cast a ballot
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.