Sojourner Truth
Isabella Bomefree
1797-1883
She was born into slavery as Isabella Bomefree in rural New York. Her first language was Dutch. By the time she was 9, she had been sold away from her parents. By the time she escaped bondage in 1827 (a year before New York emancipated the state’s slaves), she had endured five owners, several beatings and separation from her children.
As a free woman, she successfully sued for the return of her son who had been sold illegally across state lines. She also joined the Methodist Church.
When she became an itinerant Methodist preacher, she took the name Sojourner Truth. She preached for Jesus and the disempowered — advocating freedom for the slave, fairness for the poor and the franchise for women. She also helped persuade abolitionist Frederick Douglass against violent revolt to free slaves, urging him instead to place his faith in God. “Frederick,” she reportedly said, “is God dead?”
Truth was “a woman with a powerful passion for equality,” said Rev. Alfred T. Day III, the top executive of the United Methodist Commission on Archives and History. “She was part of the conscience of the Second Great Awakening in the 19th century in that Methodist spirit and paradigm inexorably linking evangelical piety and social holiness.”
Click here to return to WOMEN’S HISTORY MONTH of UNITED METHODIST page