Truth Seeker, Part 2

She was born into slavery as Isabella Baumfree. She gave herself the name Sojourner Truth in 1843. How old was she when she adopted her new name. Her name means ‘truth-seeker’. Sojourner was best known for her speech entitled, “Ain’t I a woman?” that she delivered in 1851 at the Ohio Women’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio.

In 1806, at the age of nine, she was sold by her original owner to another man named John Neely for $100, along with a flock of sheep! She would be sold two other times over the next four years of her life. Both times she was sold for less than $200 dollars. At this time in her life, she only spoke Dutch, the language of her first owner, Colonel Johannes Hardenbergh.
Isabella became a free woman when she ran away from her owner to work for another family in New York state. New York had an emancipation law that made slavery illegal in 1826.

By 1844, she had changed her name to Sojourner Truth and traveled across the country speaking about abolition, the movement to end legal slavery. Slavery did not become illegal in all states until the Thirteenth Amendment was passed on December 18th, 1865. Sojourner Truth was an outspoken critic of slavery for 21 years before all slaves were legally free in this country! Truth started dictating her memoirs to her friend Olive Gilbert, and in 1850 William Lloyd Garrison privately published her book, The Narrative of Sojourner Truth: A Northern Slave. That same year, she purchased a home in Northampton, Massachusetts for $300. This was remarkable, being that she could own property as a single black woman 15 years before the abolition of slavery in this country.