Sojourner Truth: First Black Woman to Sue a White Man in U.S. Court
Who Was Sojourner Truth?
Born Isabella Baumfree in 1797, Sojourner Truth escaped from slavery at age 29, forced to leave four of her five children behind when she fled to New Paltz, New York.
What Did Sojourner Truth Do?
When her previous owner attempted to illegally sell her five-year-old son Peter, she filed a lawsuit that awarded her custody of her son, making her the first Black woman to successfully sue a white man in a U.S. court of law.
Committing to preach the word of God in 1843, she changed her name to Sojourner Truth, before joining a Massachusetts abolitionist group in 1844, where she met leading abolitionist figures like Frederick Douglass. Later, at an 1851 Women’s Rights Convention in Ohio, Truth spoke powerfully about equal rights for Black women, where she purportedly posed the question “Ar’n’t I a Woman,” which has since been challenged by historians as a less than accurate accounting of her words.
Speeches of Truth
What isn’t in doubt is that many of Truth’s speeches moved audiences throughout her life as an evangelical activist, winning her audiences with leading suffragettes such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. In tandem with escaped slave and famous activist, Harriet Tubman, Truth helped in the recruitment of Black soldiers during the Civil War, where she worked at the National Freedman’s Relief Association in Washington, D.C., urging Americans to donate food, clothing and other supplies to freed Black refugees.
Her abolitionist activism soon caught the attention of President Abraham Lincoln, who invited her to the White House in October of 1864, where he showed her a Bible given to him by African Americans living in nearby Baltimore.
The Death of Sojourner Truth
She also showed her disdain for hypocrisy while in Washington, by riding on whites-only streetcars in protest of the segregationist sentiments of the time. Two years after the end of the Civil War, Truth retired to Battle Creek Michigan, where several of her daughters lived, passing away at home on November 26, 1883 at the age of 86, although her tombstone shows her age to be 105 at the time of her death.
Sojourner Truth’s life of preaching and civil rights activism can best be summed up in a speech she delivered in 1863 when she said:
“Children, who made your skin white? Was it not God? Who made mine Black? Was it not the same God? Am I to blame, therefore, because my skin is Black? …. Does not God love colored children as well as white children? And did not the same Savior die to save the one as well as the other?”
Sojourner Truth