Sojourner Truth statue in Florence, Massachusetts
As you may have heard, March is Women’s History Month, and to celebrate, I’m visiting women’s history sites here in my home state of Massachusetts. I’ll be posting about them each week in March, starting with a surprising one close to home that I discovered not long ago.
I’ve lived in the Pioneer Valley of western Massachusetts for almost a decade now, but I only recently learned that Sojourner Truth spent 14 years in Northampton, about six miles from where I live. She moved there in 1843 to join the Northampton Association of Education and Industry, an abolitionist utopian community that she was a part of for the four years that it existed. In 1850, she bought a house in Florence, a village of Northampton, and lived there until she moved to Michigan in 1857.
Did you know Sojourner Truth never said “Ain’t I a woman?” in her most famous speech? She delivered that speech at the Akron, Ohio, Women’s Rights Convention in 1851, but a white abolitionist named Frances Dana Barker Gage published a very different version in 1863, giving it the voice of a southern Black woman. In fact, Sojourner Truth, originally named Isabella Baumfree, was born into slavery in Rifton, New York, and grew up speaking Dutch, maintaining a Dutch accent throughout her life.
Isabella escaped slavery with her infant daughter in 1826 but was forced to leave her other children behind. In 1828, she became the first Black person to win a court case against a white man when she obtained freedom for her son, who had been sold and sent to Alabama. Fifteen years later, Isabella changed her name to Sojourner Truth. Although women were often barred from leadership by male abolitionists, and Black women were marginalized in the suffrage movement, Sojourner Truth lived up to her chosen name, traveling around the country as a speaker and activist for both causes.
If you want to learn more, a good place to start is with So Tall Within: Sojourner Truth’s Long Walk Toward Freedom by Newbery Honor author Gary D. Schmidt and illustrated by Caldecott and Coretta Scott Honor winner Daniel Minter (Roaring Brook Press, 2018). And I’d love to learn about other women’s history sites, so share your favorites in the comments!