On July 4, 1876, Sojourner Truth marched with a delegation of women into the centennial celebration in Philadelphia — the official gathering to commemorate one hundred years of American independence — and attempted to present a women's rights declaration to the presiding officer.

They were refused. The men at the table would not accept the document. The women left copies on seats as they exited, distributing what they could not formally deliver.

Truth had been making this argument for decades. Born Isabella Baumfree, enslaved in New York, she escaped with her infant daughter in 1826 and became one of the most effective abolitionist speakers in the country — in an era when a Black woman speaking to mixed audiences was itself an act of defiance. In 1851, at the Women's Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio, she delivered what was later titled "Ain't I a Woman?" — a speech that tied together the physical labor of enslaved women, the denial of femininity to Black women, and the absurdity of arguing women were too weak for rights.

At the centennial she was 79, by her own uncertain reckoning. She had been fighting for 50 years. The country was celebrating its independence from Britain while four million people who had recently been enslaved were watching Reconstruction collapse around them.

She died in 1883.