The autobiography of a Black woman who defied nineteenth-century
conventions to become a preacher, popular speaker, abolitionist, and
women's rights activist.
Sojourner Truth was an incredible, remarkable, epoch-defying woman who
escaped from slavery and successfully sued for her son's freedom, in
addition to her career as a wildly successful orator and activist--a
woman alive to the hypocrisies of her age, and unafraid to talk about
them.
Her autobiography, which she dictated, is an outstanding historical
document. Truth's tale sheds a light on realities of slavery that are
still rarely discussed: that she was a slave in upstate New York, not on
a Southern plantation; that Dutch was her first language; that the
circumstances of her slavery isolated her from a broader Black
community; that her experience of religion was a racially integrated
one, and became the means of her independence. Ultimately, The
Narrative of Sojourner Truth is the story of a great American that
reveals aspects of slavery and free Black life that are too often
overlooked.