In the Summer I went up into the Hudson Valley to see a statue of Sojourner Truth as a young woman. In the Fall I saw the statue of Truth as a middle-aged woman in Northampton, Massachusetts.
Sojourner Truth was from New York and she was already well known by the time she moved to Massachusetts in 1843. She came to join the Northampton Association for Education and Industry – a “utopian, abolitionist community organized around a communally operated silk factory” in an area called Florence. While the experiment did not take hold, Sojourner said that she felt freer to discuss slavery and race than in other areas of her life. She also got to know William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass and Wendell Phillips, three leaders in the Abolitionist movement, while in Northampton.
The statue is in a triangle where Park Street and Pine Street intersect.
In the early 1990s, organizers in Northampton began the work of developing plans to commemorate Sojourner Truth. The Massachusetts Legislature approved a $100,000 matching grant for the project. Several local institutions began donating money, including Smith College. A grassroots donor program was also started by the Unitarian church in the community. Thomas Jay Warren was selected as the sculptor. He was born in Mississippi in 1958.
Truth lived in Florence until 1857, using it as a base for her activities against slavery. She bought a home at 35 Park Street, near where the statue is now located.
Truth spoke at the Women’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio in 1851. The speech attracted national attention. Here is part of it:
“I have as much muscle as any man, and can do as much work as any man. I have plowed and reaped and husked and chopped and mowed, and can any man do more than that?
I have heard much about the sexes being equal; I can carry as much as any man, and can (c) eat as much too, if (d) I can get it. I am as strong as any man that is now.
As for intellect, all I can say is, (e) if women have a pint and man a quart – why can’t she have her little pint full? You need not be afraid to give us our rights for fear we will take too much, for we cant take more than our pint’ll hold.
The poor men seem to be all in confusion, and dont know what to do. Why children, if you have woman’s rights, give it to her and you will feel better. You will have your own rights, and they wont be so much trouble.
I cant read, but I can hear.
I have heard the bible and have learned that Eve caused man to sin. Well if woman upset the world, do give her a chance to set it right side up again.
The Lady has spoken about Jesus, how he never spurned woman from him, and she was right.
When Lazarus died, Mary and Martha came to him with faith and love and besought him to raise their brother. And Jesus wept – and Lazarus came forth.
And how came Jesus into the world? Through God who created him and woman who bore him.
Man, where is your part? But the women are coming up blessed be God and a few of the men are coming up with them. But man is in a tight place, the poor slave is on him, woman is coming on him, and he is surely between-a hawk and a buzzard.”
In 1867, Sojourner Truth gave her Address to the First Annual Meeting of the American Equal Rights Association in which she called for equality for both Black men and Black women. She said:
“My friends, I am rejoiced that you are glad, but I don’t know how you will feel when I get through. I come from another field- the country of the slave. They have got their liberty- so much good luck to have slavery partly destroyed; not entirely. I want it root and branch destroyed. Then we will all be free indeed. I feel that if I have to answer for the deeds done in my body just as much as man, I have a right to have as much as a man. There is a great stir about colored men getting their rights, but not a word about the colored women; and if colored men get their rights, and not colored women theirs, you see the colored men will be masters over the women, and it will be just as bad as it was before. So I am for keeping the thing going while things are stirring; because if we wait till it is still, it will take a great while to get it going again.”
“I am above eighty years old; it is about time for me to be going. I have been forty years a slave and forty years free, and would be here forty years more to have equal rights for all. I suppose I am kept here because something remains for me to do; I suppose I am yet to help to break the chain. I have done a great deal of work; as much as a man, but did not get so much pay. I used to work in the field and bind grain, keeping up with the cradler, but men doing no more, got twice as much pay; so with the German women. They work in the field and do as much work but do not get the pay. We do as much, eat as much, we want as much. I suppose I am about the only colored woman who goes about to speak for the rights of the colored women. I want to keep the thing stirring, now that the ice is cracked.”
Sojourner Truth was named Isabella Bomfree at birth. She was born a slave in Dutch-speaking Ulster County, New York. This was a time where many people who lived in the rural Hudson Valley still spoke Dutch even though their families had immigrated in the 1600s. She was born in 1797. She was sold four times, and had five children. In 1827 she ran away from her master to a local Abolitionist family named the Van Wageners. The Van Wageners purchased her freedom and helped her sue to get back her son who had been sold to a slaveowner in Alabama.
During the Civil War, Truth called for Black young men to join the United States Colored Troops and she raised supplies to assist them. In October, 1864, Sojourner Truth travelled from her new home in Michigan to try to see Abraham Lincoln in Washington. Lucy Coleman, a white woman, used her connection to Elizabeth Keckley, Mary Todd Lincoln’s dressmaker, to set up and appointment for Truth with the president. In 1891, Coleman wrote that Lincoln “was not himself with this colored woman; he had no funny story…” She saw Truth’s race as a dividing line for the president. Truth, however, wrote shortly afterward that “I never was treated by any one with more kindness and cordiality than were shown to me by that great and good man, Abraham Lincoln.”
A British journalist, Fred Tompkins, wrote that Lincoln said he had seen Truth “often.” However, Tompkins told Lincoln that during a reception at the White House on February 25, 1865, Truth was refused admission. Lincoln “expressed his sorrow, and said… that it should not occur again.”
As a New Yorker, Truth occupies heroic status for me and my family. She was an early anti-slavery activist, a Black rights advocate, a women’s rights witness, and she provided help to refugees.
All color photos were taken by Pat Young unless otherwise noted. To see more sites Pat visited CLICK HERE for Google Earth view. Thanks to Dave Lederer for taking me out to see this statue when I visited him.
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