On August 1, 1843, a woman born into slavery as Isabella Baumfree stood before a Methodist camp meeting in Northampton, Massachusetts, and delivered the first public speech of a new identity. She had renamed herself Sojourner Truth — sojourner for the traveling preacher she intended to become, Truth for the gospel she intended to preach.

She was forty-six years old. She had escaped slavery with one infant daughter in 1826, walked away in the pre-dawn hours because her enslaver had broken a promise to free her. The other children stayed behind. She sued for the return of her son Peter, illegally sold into Alabama — and won, becoming one of the first Black women in American history to successfully bring a case against a white man in a U.S. court.

The speech at Northampton was the beginning of a decade of itinerant preaching and abolitionist advocacy that made her one of the most recognizable voices in America. She spoke without notes, in a Dutch-accented English she had only learned as her second language. She spoke about the body: what it meant to have a body that belonged to someone else, to have the labor of that body taken, to have the children of that body sold. The audiences who came expecting a curiosity got a theologian.

In 1851, at the Women's Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio, she delivered what was later reconstructed and retitled Ain't I a Woman? — a speech whose actual text has never been definitively recovered. The version most often quoted, with its repeated refrain, was written down by Frances Gage twelve years later and probably shaped by Gage's own rhetoric. The speech as delivered was likely different. Truth spent the rest of her life unable to correct the record, because she never learned to read or write.

This is the central irony of her legacy: one of the most quoted women in American history produced no text. Her words exist only through people who wrote them down, who shaped them, who gave them rhythms she may not have used. She knew this was happening and kept speaking anyway.

During the Civil War, she recruited Black troops for the Union Army in Michigan. In 1864 she met Lincoln at the White House. After the war she advocated for land grants for formerly enslaved people — a program that was never funded — and for voting rights for Black women, a cause the mainstream suffrage movement repeatedly deprioritized.

She died in 1883 in Battle Creek, Michigan, at approximately eighty-six years old. Her gravestone was vandalized twice before the Civil Rights Movement restored it.

The Narrative of Sojourner Truth, dictated to Olive Gilbert, was published in 1850. It sold enough copies to let her buy a house. She gave the rest of her lecture earnings away.