Sojourner Truth: A Women's Rights Activist

Sojourner Truth was her self-given name, while Isabella (Belle) Baumfree was her birth name, because in 1843, she had believed that God wanted her to leave the city and ‘testify the hope that was in her’. During her life, she was known as a Women’s Rights Activist and a Civil Rights Activist. She was born in 1797 in the town of Swartekill, in Ulster County, New York, though the actual date had never been recorded. Then at the age of 85 she had died on November 26th, 1883 in Battle Creek Michigan. Sojourner had been one of twelve children, who were born to James and Elizabeth Baumfree, and had been owned by Colonel Hardenbergh. At the age of nine, she had been sold to John Neely due to Hardenbergh’s death in 1806. She had been born into slavery,
but had escaped with her infant daughter in 1826, and from then on she had devoted her life to the abolitionist cause. Though in 1828, she had gone to court to recover her son, Peter, and had won the case, making her the first black woman to win a case against a white male.