Sojourner Truth, a member of the AME Zion Church in Battle Creek, MI, was born around 1797 as Isabella Baumfree, an enslaved woman in Ulster County, NY. As a fugitive slave she took part in movements to secure rights for African Americans, poor people and women. In 1826 she ran away and found refuge with the Von Wageners, a Quaker family and, with their assistance, sued for her son’s return to New York. In 1843 Isabella Baumfree reinvented herself, assumed a new identity, Sojourner Truth, and began a crusade as a wandering evangelist. That same year Truth became a member of the Northampton Association, whose members included Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison. From them she learned the liberal and political constructs of abolitionism and feminism.

Truth published her life story in 1850 as The Narrative of Sojourner Truth which became a powerful weapon in the abolitionist cause. Moving to Washington, D.C. in 1863, Sojourner Truth worked on behalf of black Civil War soldiers, nursed and taught domestic skills to freed slaves and protested segregation on trolley cars there. While she supported suffrage for black men, she also recognized the link between racism and sexism. “There is a great deal of stir about colored men getting their rights but not a word about the colored women’s theirs, you see, the colored man will be masters over the women, and it will be just as bad as it was before.” Sojourner Truth died in1883 in Battle Creek, MI.