Sojourner Truth's Quotes

If women want rights more than they got, why don't they just take them, and not be talking about it.

I'm not going to die, I'm going home like a shooting star.

I feel safe in the midst of my enemies, for the truth is all powerful and will prevail.

If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, these women together ought to be able to turn it back, and get it right side up again! And now they is asking to do it, the men better let them.

Then that little man in black there, he says women can't have as much rights as men, 'cause Christ wasn't a woman! Where did your Christ come from? Where did Christ come from? From God and a woman! Man had nothing to do with Him.

Then I will speak upon the ashes.

That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain't I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain't I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man - when I could get it - and bear the lash as well! And ain't I a woman? I have borne five children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain't I a woman?

It is the mind that makes the body.

If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down, these women together ought to be able to turn it right again.

You have been having our rights so long, that you think, like a slave-holder, that you own us. I know that it is hard for one who has held the reins for so long to give up; it cuts like a knife. It will feel all the better when it closes up again.

Life in this world,” he said, “is, as it were, a sojourn in a cave. What can we know of reality? For all we see of the true nature of existence is, shall we say, no more than bewildering and amusing shadows cast upon the inner wall of the cave by the unseen blinding light of absolute truth, from which we may or may not deduce some glimmer of veracity, and we as troglodyte seekers of wisdom can only lift our voices to the unseen and say, humbly, ‘Go on, do Deformed Rabbit . . . it’s my favorite.’

If it is not a fit place for women, it is unfit for men to be there.

Let others say what they will of the efficacy of prayer, I believe in it, and I shall pray. Thank God! Yes, I shall always pray,

We have all been thrown down so low that nobody thought we'd ever get up again; but we have been long enough trodden now; we will come up again, and now I am here.

Where there is so much racket, there must be something out of kilter

This thing I am feeling, I’m almost certain, is the closest I’ll ever come to standing somewhere in between truth and reconciliation.

Sojourner Truth, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Frederick Douglass: Their voices, articulating the feelings of innumerable others, ultimately prevailed in the causes of emancipation and of suffrage. It took presidential action to make things official—a Lincoln to free the slaves, a Wilson to support the women’s suffrage amendment, a Lyndon Johnson to finish the fight against Jim Crow—but without the voices from afar, there would have been no chorus of liberty. The lesson: The work of reformers—long, hard, almost unimaginably difficult work—can lead to progress and a broader understanding of who is included in the phrase “We, the People” that opened the Preamble of the Constitution. And that work unfolds still.

Now, if you want me to get out of the world, you had better get the women votin' soon. I shan't go till I can do that.

You may hiss as much as you please, but women will get their rights anyway

I think that ’twixt the negroes of the South and the women at the North, all talking about rights, the white men will be in a fix pretty soon. —Words popularly attributed to SOJOURNER TRUTH, the Woman’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio, 1851

Life is a hard battle anyway. If we laugh and sing a little as we fight the good fight of freedom, it makes it all go easier. I will not allow my life's light to be determined by the darkness around me.

Life in this world,” he said, “is, as it were, a sojourn in a cave. What can we know of reality? For all we see of the true nature of existence is, shall we say, no more than bewildering and amusing shadows cast upon the inner wall of the cave by the unseen blinding light of absolute truth, from which we may or may not deduce some glimmer of veracity, and we as troglodyte seekers of wisdom can only lift our voices to the unseen and say, humbly, ‘Go on, do Deformed Rabbit…it’s my favorite.

Yes,' she said, 'the rich rob the poor, and the poor rob one another.

he was soon drawn into a circle of associates who did not improve either his habits or his morals.

If this were a courageous country, it would ask Gloria to lead it since she is sane and funny and beautiful and smart and the National Leaders we've always had are not. When I listen to her talk about women's rights children's rights men's rights I think of the long line of Americans who should have been president, but weren't. Imagine Crazy Horse as president. Sojourner Truth. John Brown. Harriet Tubman. Black Elk or Geronimo. Imagine President Martin Luther King confronting the youthful "Oppie" Oppenheimer. Imagine President Malcolm X going after the Klan. Imagine President Stevie Wonder dealing with the "Truly Needy." Imagine President Shirley Chisholm, Ron Dellums, or Sweet Honey in the Rock dealing with Anything. It is imagining to make us weep with frustration, as we languish under real estate dealers, killers, and bad actors.

Children, who made your skin white? Was it not God? Who made mine black? Was it not the same God? Am I to blame, therefore, because my skin is black?...Does not God love coloured children as well as white children? And did not the same Saviour die to save the one as well as the other?

And what is that religion that sanctions, even by its silence, all that is embraced in the 'Peculiar Institution'? If there can be any thing more diametrically opposed to the religion of Jesus, than the working of this soul-killing system - which is as truly sanctioned by the religion of America as are her minsters and churches - we wish to be shown where it can be found.

in 1851, an aged black woman, who had been born a slave in New York, tall, thin, wearing a gray dress and white turban, listened to some male ministers who had been dominating the discussion. This was Sojourner Truth. She rose to her feet and joined the indignation of her race to the indignation of her sex: That man over there says that woman needs to be helped into carriages and lifted over ditches. . . . Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles or gives me any best place. And a’nt I a woman? Look at my arm! I have ploughed, and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And a’nt I a woman? I would work as much and eat as much as a man, when I could get it, and bear the lash as well. And a’nt I a woman? I have borne thirteen children and seen em most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And a’nt I a woman? Thus were women beginning to resist, in the 1830s and 1840s and 1850s, the attempt to keep them in their “woman’s sphere.” They were taking part in all sorts of movements, for prisoners, for the insane, for black slaves, and also for all women.

In heartening contrast to our own “culture of complaint,” in which the idea of human solidarity seems lost in the clamor of victim groups competing for attention and entitlement, Sojourner Truth grew to understand that her personal quest for freedom was meaningful only as a moment in a larger struggle against the burden of injustice.

Many slaveholders boast of the love of their slaves. How would it freeze the blood of some of them to know what kind of love rankles in the bosoms of slaves for them! Witness the attempt to poison Mrs. Calhoun, and hundreds of similar cases. Most 'surprising ' to every body, because committed by slaves supposed to be so grateful for their chains.

I tell you I can’t read a book, but I can read de people.

her unwavering confidence in an arm which she believed to be stronger than all others combined could have raised from her sinking spirit.

Tubman is the subject of more children’s books than any other African American historical figure, including Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth, her

Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Ida Wells and Rosa Parks are not exceptional Black women as much as they are epitomes of Black womanhood.

Look there above the center, where the flag is waving bright; We are going out of slavery, we are bound for freedom's light; We mean to show Jeff Davis how the Africans can fight...

Sojourner Truth, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Frederick Douglass: Their voices, articulating the feelings of innumerable others, ultimately prevailed in the causes of emancipation and of suffrage.

As we were walking the other day, she said she had often thought what a beautiful world this would be, when we should see every thing right side up. Now, we see every thing topsy-turvy, and all is confusion.

Oh Lord,' inquired Isabella, 'what is this slavery, that it can do such dreadful things? what evil can it not do?' Well may she ask, for surely the evils it can and does do, daily and hourly, can never be summed up, till we can see them as they are recorded by him who writes no errors, and reckons without mistake.

absurdity of the claims so arrogantly set up by the masters, over beings designed by God to be as free as kings; and at the perfect stupidity of the slave, in admitting for one moment the validity of these claims.

Dutch was the first language of noted abolitionist Sojourner Truth, born Isabella Baumfree in Swartekill, New York, near the end of the 1790s. She almost certainly spoke English with a Dutch-inflected accent. Yet, reproductions of her speech were written in the stereotypical dialect universally chosen to portray the speech of enslaved Blacks, no matter where in the country they lived. Under this formulation, the experiences of growing up hearing and speaking Dutch had no effect upon Truth. It was as if the legal status of being enslaved, and the biological reality of having been born of African descent, fixed her pattern of speech, almost as a matter of brain function.

Rosa Parks drew solace & sustenance from the long history of Black resistance before her time, placing her action & the Montgomery bus boycott in the continuum of Black protest. Her speech notes during the boycott read: 'Reading histories of others--Crispus Attucks through all wars--Richard Allen--Dr. Adam Clayton Powell Sr. & Jr. Women Phyllis Wheatley--Sojourner Truth--Harriet Tubman, Mary McLeod Bethune. For Parks, the ability to keep going, to know that the struggle for justice was possible amidst all the setbacks they encountered, was partly possible through reading & referencing the long Black struggle before her.

After turning it in her mind for some time, she came to the conclusion, that she had been taking part in a great drama, which was, in itself, but one great system of robbery and wrong. 'Yes,' she said, 'the rich rob the poor, and the poor rob one another.' True, she had not received labor from others, and stinted their pay, as she felt had been practised against her; but she had taken their work from them, which was their only means to get money, and was the same to them in the end. For instance–a gentleman where she lived would give her a dollar to hire a poor man to clear the new-fallen snow from the steps and side-walks. She would arise early, and perform the labor herself, putting the money into her own pocket. A poor man would come along, saying she ought to have let him have the job; he was poor, and needed the pay for his family. She would harden her heart against him, and answer–'I am poor too, and I need it for mine.' But, in her retrospection, she thought of all the misery she might have been adding to, in her selfish grasping, and it troubled her conscience sorely; and this insensibility to the claims of human brotherhood, and the wants of the destitute and wretched poor, she now saw, as she never had done before, to be unfeeling, selfish and wicked.

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING Judith Barrington, Writing the Memoir: From Truth to Art; Annie Dillard and Cort Conley, eds., Modern American Memoirs; Patricia Hampl, I Could Tell You Stories: Sojourns in the Land of Memory; Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life; Phillip Lopate, ed., The Art of the Personal Essay; Jane Taylor McDonnell, Living to Tell the Tale: A Guide to Writing Memoir; and William Zinsser, ed., Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir.

I am not going to die; I’m going home like a shooting star.

I’m not going to die, honey. I’m going home like a shooting star.

Simply put, DHARMA is Dhya (Aim) mein (unto) raman (walkabout) - Sojourn Unto the [Ultimate] Aim [the Truth of What Is- God].

And a'n't, I a woman? I have borne thirteen chilern, and seen 'em mos' all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me! And a'n't I a woman?

I have met with many souls who were afraid to speak their minds; from a vague anxiousness to a choking reaction. This restriction may come from a past life where this person was threatened, beaten, strangled, tortured or killed for expressing something unpopular or for declaring some truth. Heretics, those who took controversial positions, especially against the established Church, were the victims of terrible persecutions - and worse. Heretic ironically comes from the Greek hairetikos, meaning 'able to choose.' Thousands were condemned, then, for their ability to choose differently. And so, then and now, we all must choose standing safely with the system or defiantly and dangerously against the herd mentality/ machine/system – yes, perennial lessons of conformity or individuality. History can attest that Free Will and liberality are not always welcome in certain groups and societies. We must not be dissuaded, we can still shine our light.

Think you, dear reader, when that day comes, the most 'rapid abolitionist' will say-'Behold, I saw all this while on the earth?' Will he not rather say, 'Oh, who has conceived the breadth and depth of this moral malaria, this putrescent plague-spot?' Perhaps the pioneers in the slave's cause will be as much surprised as any to find that with all their looking, there remained so much unseen.

I have learned that the ambition of those who follow selfish precepts is no more than a chaotic waste, a finite gain that must be followed by infinite loss. For there is indeed a harmony in the universe, a concordant singing of common weal. To join that song, one must find inner harmony, must find the notes that ring true. There is one other point to be made about that truth: Evil creatures cannot sing.

Certain black women faced the triple hurdle—of being abolitionists in a slave society, of being black among white reformers, and of being women in a reform movement dominated by men. When Sojourner Truth rose to speak in 1853 in New York City at the Fourth National Woman’s Rights Convention, it all came together. There was a hostile mob in the hall shouting, jeering, threatening. She said: I know that it feels a kind o’ hissin’ and ticklin’ like to see a colored woman get up and tell you about things, and Woman’s Rights. We have all been thrown down so low that nobody thought we’d ever get up again; but . . . we will come up again, and now I’m here. . . . we’ll have our rights; see if we don’t; and you can’t stop us from them; see if you can. You may hiss as much as you like, but it is comin’. . . . I am sittin’ among you to watch; and every once and awhile I will come out and tell you what time of night it is. . . .

Through all the scenes of her eventful life may be traced the energy of a naturally powerful mind—the fearlessness and child-like simplicity of one untrammelled by education or conventional customs—purity of character—an unflinching adherence to principle—and a native enthusiasm, which, under different circumstances, might easily have produced another Joan of Arc. With all her fervor, and enthusiasm, and speculation, her religion is not tinctured in the least with gloom. No doubt, no hesitation, no despondency, spreads a cloud over her soul; but all is bright, clear, positive, and at times ecstatic. Her trust is in God, and from him she looks for good, and not evil. She feels that ‘perfect love casteth out fear.

For there is indeed a harmony in the universe, a concordant singing of common weal. To join that song, one must find inner harmony, must find the notes that ring true. There is one point to be made about that truth: Evil creatures cannot sing.

A series of women's conventions in various parts of the country followed the one at Seneca Falls. At one of these, in 1851, an aged black woman, who had been born a slave in New York, tall, thin, wearing a gray dress and white turban, listened to some male ministers who had been dominating the discussion. This was Sojourner Truth. She rose to her feet and joined the indignation of her race to the indignation of her sex: That man over there says that woman needs to be helped into carriages and lifted over ditches. . . Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles or gives me any best place. And a'nt I a woman? Look at my arm! I have ploughed, and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! and a'nt I a woman? I would work as much and eat as much as a man, when I could get it, and bear the lash as well. And a'nt I a woman? I have borne thirteen children and seen em most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me! And a'nt I a woman?

Dat man ober dar say dat women needs to be helped into carriages, and lifted ober ditches, and to have de best places… and ain’t I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm!... I have plowed, and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me - and ain’t I a woman? I could work as much as any man (when I could get it), and bear de lash as well - and ain’t I a woman? I have borne five children and I seen ‘em mos all sold off into slavery, and when I cried out with a mother’s gried, none but Jesus hear - and ain’t I a woman?

If de fust woman God ever made was strong enough to turn de world upside down all alone, dese women togedder (and she glanced her eye over the platform) ought to be able to turn it back, and get it right side up again! And now dey is asking to do it, de men better let 'em.

Possessing an undeniable charisma and powerful oratorical abilities, Sojourner Truth tore down the claims that female weakness was incompatible with suffrage—and she did this with irrefutable logic. The leader of the provocateurs had argued that it was ridiculous for women to desire the vote, since they could not even walk over a puddle or get into a carriage without the help of a man. Sojourner Truth pointed out with compelling simplicity that she herself had never been helped over mud puddles or into carriages. “And ain’t I a woman?” With a voice like “rolling thunder,”44 she said, “Look at me! Look at my arm,” and rolled up her sleeve to reveal the “tremendous muscular power” of her arm.45

Thus, in truth, a sojourn in Rome means an expansion of view that is beyond words. Whereas up to that time I had been accustomed to image Christianity to myself as a delicate flower, divine because of its supernatural fragility, now I saw that it was a tree in whose branches the fowls of the air, once the enemies of its tender growth, can lodge in security—divine since the wideness of its reach and the strength of its mighty roots can be accounted for by nothing else. Before I had thought of it as of a fine, sweet aroma, to be appreciated apart; now I saw that it was the leaven, hid in the heavy measures of the world, expressing itself in terms incalculably coarser than itself, until the whole is leavened.

I have plowed and planted and gathered into barns, and no man could head me—and ain’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man (when I could get it) and bear the lash as well—and ain’t I a woman? I have borne . . . children and seen all sold off into slavery, and when I cried out with a mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me—and ain’t I a woman?

All who eat swine’s flesh are of the devil; and just as certain as he eats it, he will tell a lie in less than half an hour. If you eat a piece of pork, it will go crooked through you, and the Holy Ghost will not stay in you, but one or the other must leave the house pretty soon. The pork will be as crooked in you as ram’s horns, and as great a nuisance as the hogs in the street.

Den dat little man in black dar, he say women can't have as much rights as men, 'cause Christ wan't a woman! Whar did your Christ come from?" Rolling thunder couldn't have stilled that crowd, as did those deep, wonderful tones, as she stood there with outstretched arms and eyes of fire. Raising her voice still louder, she repeated, "Whar did your Christ come from? From God and a woman!

For Anne Hutchinson, who knew it was illegal for women to teach from the Bible in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, but did it anyway, we give thanks. For William Wilberforce, who channeled his evangelical fervor into abolishing slavery in the British Empire, vowing “never, never will we desist till we have wiped away this scandal from the Christian name,”29 we give thanks. For Sojourner Truth, who proclaimed her own humanity in a culture that did not recognize it, we give thanks. For Maximilian Kolbe, the Franciscan friar who volunteered to die in the place of a Jewish stranger at Auschwitz, we give thanks. For the pastors, black and white, who linked arms with Martin Luther King Jr. and marched on Washington, we give thanks. For Rosa Parks, who kept her seat, we give thanks. For all who did the right thing even when it was hard, we give thanks.

Progressives today are quick to fault “America” for slavery and a host of other outrages. America did this, America did that. As we will see in this book, America didn’t do those things, the Democrats did. So the Democrats have cleverly foisted their sins on America, and then presented themselves as the messiahs offering redemption for those sins. It’s crazy, but it’s also ingenious. We have to give them credit for ingenuity. The second whitewash is to portray the Civil War entirely in terms of the North versus the South. The North is supposedly the anti-slavery side and the South is the pro-slavery side. A recent example is Ta-Nehisi Coates’s article about the Confederate battle flag in The Atlantic.3 Now of course there is an element of truth in this, in that the Civil War was fought between northern states and southern states. But this neat and convenient division ignores several important details. First, the defenders of the Confederate cause were, almost without exception, Democrats. Coates cites many malefactors from Senator Jefferson Davis to Senator James Henry Hammond to Georgia Governor Joseph Brown. Yet while identifying these men as southerners and Confederates, Coates omits to identify them as Democrats. Second, Coates and other progressives conveniently ignore the fact that northern Democrats were also protectors of slavery. We will see in this chapter how Stephen Douglas and other northern Democrats fought to protect slavery in the South and in the new territories. Moreover, the southerners who fought for the Confederacy cannot be said to have fought merely to protect slavery on their plantations. Indeed, fewer than one-third of white families in the South on the eve of the Civil War had slaves. Thus the rigid North-South interpretation of the Civil War conceals—and is intended to conceal—the active complicity of Democrats across the country to save, protect, and even extend the “peculiar institution.” As the Charleston Mercury editorialized during the secession debate, the duty of the South was to “rally under the banner of the Democratic Party which has recognized and supported . . . the rights of the South.”4 The real divide was between the Democratic Party as the upholder of slavery and the Republican Party as the adversary of slavery. All the figures who upheld and defended American slavery—Senators John C. Calhoun and Stephen Douglas, President James Buchanan, Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney, architect of the Dred Scott decision, and the main leaders of the Confederacy—were Democrats. All the heroes of black emancipation—from the black abolitionists Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass, to the woman who organized the Underground Railroad, Harriet Tubman, to the leader whose actions finally destroyed American slavery, Abraham Lincoln—were Republicans. It is of the utmost importance to progressive propagandists to conceal or at least ignore this essential historical truth.

PSALM 15 O LORD,  uwho shall sojourn in your  vtent? Who shall dwell on your  wholy hill? 2 He who  xwalks blamelessly and  ydoes what is right and  zspeaks truth in his heart; 3 who  adoes not slander with his tongue and does no evil to his neighbor, nor  btakes up a reproach against his friend; 4  cin whose eyes a vile person is despised, but who honors those who fear the LORD; who  dswears to his own hurt and does not change; 5 who  edoes not put out his money at interest and  fdoes not take a bribe against the innocent. He who does these things shall never be  gmoved.

That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain’t I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man—when I could get it—and bear the lash as well! And ain’t I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen them most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain’t I a woman?

O LORD,  u who shall sojourn in your  v tent?         Who shall dwell on your  w holy hill?     2 He who  x walks blamelessly and  y does what is right         and  z speaks truth in his heart; 3    who  a does not slander with his tongue         and does no evil to his neighbor,         nor  b takes up a reproach against his friend; 4     c in whose eyes a vile person is despised,         but who honors those who fear the LORD;     who  d swears to his own hurt and does not change; 5    who  e does not put out his money at interest         and  f does not take a bribe against the innocent.     He who does these things shall never be  g moved.

Who Shall Dwell on Your Holy Hill? A Psalm of David.     PSALM 15 O LORD,  u who shall sojourn in your  v tent?         Who shall dwell on your  w holy hill?     2 He who  x walks blamelessly and  y does what is right         and  z speaks truth in his heart; 3    who  a does not slander with his tongue         and does no evil to his neighbor,         nor  b takes up a reproach against his friend; 4     c in whose eyes a vile person is despised,         but who honors those who fear the LORD;     who  d swears to his own hurt and does not change; 5    who  e does not put out his money at interest         and  f does not take a bribe against the innocent.     He who does these things shall never be  g moved.

In Mississippi, where I lived from 1967 to 1974, people who challenged the system anticipated menace, battery, even murder, every day. In this context, I sometimes felt ashamed that my contributions at the time were not more radical. I taught in two local black colleges, I wrote about the Movement, and I created tiny history booklets which were used to teach the teachers of children enrolled in Head Start. And, of course, I was interracially married, which was illegal. It was perhaps in Mississippi during those years that I understood how the daily news of disaster can become, for the spirit, a numbing assault, and that one's own activism, however modest, fighting against this tide of death, provides at least the possibility of generating a different kind of "news." A "news" that empowers rather that defeats. There is always a moment in any kind of struggle when one feels in full bloom. Vivid. Alive. One might be blown to bits in such a moment and still be at peace. Martin Luther King, Jr., at the mountaintop. Gandhi dying with the name of God on his lips. Sojourner Truth baring her breasts at a women's rights convention in 1851. Harriet Tubman exposing her revolver to some of the slaves she had freed, who, fearing an unknown freedom, looks longingly backward to their captivity, thereby endangering the freedom of all. To be such a person or to witness anyone at this moment of transcendent presence is to know that what is human is linked, by a daring compassion, to what is divine. During my years of being close to people engaged in changing the world I have seen fear turn into courage. Sorrow into joy. Funerals into celebrations. Because whatever the consequences, people, standing side by side, have expressed who they really are, and that ultimately they believe in the love of the world and each other enough *to be that* - which is the foundation of activism. It has become a common feeling, I believe, as we have watched our heroes falling over the years, that our own small stone of activism, which might not seem to measure up to the rugged boulders of heroism we have so admired, is a paltry offering toward the building of an edifice of hope. Many who believe this choose to withhold their offerings out of shame. This is the tragedy of our world. For we can do nothing substantial toward changing our course on the planet, a destructive one, without rousing ourselves, individual by individual, and bringing our small, imperfect stones to the pile. In this regard, I have a story to tell.

Science is getting knocked on all sides these days, not only from religious fundamentalists, but from all kinds of people who perceive science as arrogant, one-sided, and the source of the troubles that come with the technology it produces. It's true that individuL scientists can be so arrogant and narrowly focused, they're blind to any but their own truths, and that new discoveries bring new problems with them. Still, I don't know many people who would refuse a biopsy for a newly discovered lump because they think science needs to be taken down a peg or two. Religion gets knocked for the same kinds of reasons as science: for its arrogance, narowmindedness, and tendency to create more trouble than it's worth. Religion is also accused of concealing reality under a comforting blanket of measureless faith -- the flip side, perhaps of the scientist for whom nothing can be real until she has measured it. My own sojourn into religion convinced me that good religion reveals rather than conceals. Religion is the soul in search of itself and its relationship to the cosmos. This journey requires looking at all of it: the joy, the sorrow, the beauty and the horror of life. We hope for the best. We want meaning and love to exist not only in ourselves, but in the very soul of the universe. At times this great hope might tempt us to pick and choose only the data that supports our desires. But in religion as in boat-building, the design must be tested in all conditions. When I say that I'm trying to pay attention, and that paying attention means being willing to look at all of it, I think I'm trying for the same moment of clarity that Graham experienced when the wind blew all over his theory. Looking at all of it is what good science is about. I believe that it's also what good religion is about.

Born into slavery in Ulster County, New York, in the last years of the eighteenth century, Sojourner Truth escaped from bondage and became a stirring advocate for abolition and for the rights of women. Sojourner Truth, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Frederick Douglass: Their voices, articulating the feelings of innumerable others, ultimately prevailed in the causes of emancipation and of suffrage. It took presidential action to make things official—a Lincoln to free the slaves, a Wilson to support the women’s suffrage amendment, a Lyndon Johnson to finish the fight against Jim Crow—but without the voices from afar, there would have been no chorus of liberty. The lesson: The work of reformers—long, hard, almost unimaginably difficult work—can lead to progress and a broader understanding of who is included in the phrase “We, the People” that opened the Preamble of the Constitution. And that work unfolds still.

A great deal of official concern was expressed about the demoralizing effects of extended sojourns in camp environments, which the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung feared would lead to the appearance of a pathological sociological subtype, Homo barackensis: “Homo barackensis has taught humankind in the twentieth century a dreadful truth: progress, humanity, and self-esteem exist only in the context of an unbroken world.

A great deal of official concern was expressed about the demoralizing effects of extended sojourns in camp environments, which the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung feared would lead to the appearance of a pathological sociological subtype, Homo barackensis: “Homo barackensis has taught humankind in the twentieth century a dreadful truth: progress, humanity, and self-esteem exist only in the context of an unbroken world. When law and order disintegrate, the camp arises—that most gruesome and cruel expression of human capabilities—and with it rises a breeding ground of nihilism.”33

The truth is that there is opportunity right now in your present day. Every day offers its own set of golden opportunities.

Love is always opposed by hate, truth is always opposed by the lie, and hope is always met with despair. Yet, we, who will dare hold fast to those things dearest in our hearts, must sojourn, from time to time, into unknown darkness to spread light. For though we live in perilous times, we shall not yield to them.

The household revolved around Matthias’s power, his anger, and obedience to him in all things.

Former slaves like Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, and Harriet Tubman added their voices to the debate. Unlike white abolitionists these leaders’ “formative years and antislavery educations were spent on southern plantations, and not in organizations dedicated to moral suasion.”47 Douglass was critical of the complicity of churches, especially Southern churches, in the continuation of slavery. His polemics against churches in his autobiography read like the preaching of an Old Testament prophet railing against the corruption of religion in their day.

Los feminismos negros han aportado invaluablemente al entendimiento de las opresiones y a la estructuración del poder. Un claro ejemplo de esa genealogía es el histórico discurso de la exesclava y abolicionista Sojourner Truth con “Ain’t I am Woman”, en 1851. Trazando esa línea de pensamiento negro, tenemos a Patricia Hill Collins, quien introduce la idea de matriz de dominación; colectivos como Combahee River Collective hablan de una simultaneidad de opresiones; feministas decoloniales, Ochy Curiel y Yuderkys Espinosa, sostienen la existencia de una imbricación de opresiones; académicas y juristas como Kimberlé Crenshaw trabajan con el término interseccionalidad. Todos estos aportes parten de la experiencia propia de las mujeres negras y denotan la realidad compleja que atraviesan. Pero, además, nos instan a entender las opresiones desde su no fragmentación. Esto es, sobre nuestres cuerpes y subjetividades operan múltiples categorías —como la “raza”, el “género”, la nacionalidad, la clase social, la orientación sexual— que nos ubican en diferentes lugares de opresión y privilegio; estas opresiones trabajan en conjunto, están entretramadas, no se pueden separar.

think that ’twixt the negroes of the South and the women at the North, all talking about rights, the white men will be in a fix pretty soon. —Words popularly attributed to SOJOURNER TRUTH, the Woman’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio, 1851

It was a civics lesson which cities across the northern tier of the country would all learn in similar fashion. Dzink and his Polish supporters had, in good American fashion, convinced their elected representatives of the justice of their cause, only to have the federal government countermand their efforts with a combination of black intelligence operations directed against American citizens and overwhelming military force. The government’s actions in the Sojourner Truth case would also establish a precedent in both housing and racial matters for the post-war period. Whenever blacks claimed discrimination, they could be sure of the federal government’s concern. Whenever the Catholic ethnics would claim that their neighborhoods were being targeted for destruction, they were written off as racists suffering from paranoid delusion. No matter how much clout the ethnics could muster locally, it could always be countered by some judge, appealing to higher moral principles. The same was true of Poles in Detroit, where “vested powers might have considered Polish Detroiters and neighborhood brokers expendable.” One year later when the worst race riot in the history of the country broke out in Detroit, the Poles again were blamed, but with the experience of Sojourner Truth behind them, Detroit’s residents were skeptical. “After the street battles of 1943,” Capeci writes, “Conant Gardens residents remembered ‘something funny’ about the 1942 housing controversy, something phoney that seemed to come from outside the neighborhood.” Residents of Chicago would soon notice the same thing.

When evil rules a time and place, certain good people are called upon to tell the truth to those who don't want to hear it.

In the upstate farmhouse he had dubbed Mount Zion, Matthias had apparently established for himself a community of seven wives—a “harem,” Locke called it—six of them wealthy white women and the seventh a black servant by the name of Isabella Van Wagenen, and “had one appointed to each working day in the week, and the black one consecrated for Sundays.” (Isabella Van Wagenen was a former slave who would later join the abolitionist movement, changing her name to the one by which she would be forever remembered: Sojourner Truth.)

Life in this world,’ he said, ‘is, as it were, a sojourn in a cave. What can we know of reality? For all we see of the true nature of existence is, shall we say, no more than bewildering and amusing shadows cast upon the inner wall of the cave by the unseen blinding light of absolute truth, from which we may or may not deduce some glimmer of veracity, and we as troglodyte seekers of wisdom can only lift our voices to the unseen and say humbly, “Go on, do Deformed Rabbit... it’s my favourite.

It is often darkest just before dawn. —SOJOURNER TRUTH

Sojourner [Truth]'s life exemplifies the process that occurs within ourselves as we grow to understand that we hold the authority to shape our own lives. This inner authority came when she embraced all of herself, which enabled her to speak from an authentic voice.

Sojourner [Truth]'s voice was the instrument that enabled her to claim her full self. Once she had done this, she was able to use her instrument and life story to help gain freedom for others.

All the heroes of black emancipation—from the black abolitionists Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass, to the woman who organized the Underground Railroad, Harriet Tubman, to the leader whose actions finally destroyed American slavery, Abraham Lincoln—were Republicans. It is of the utmost importance to progressive propagandists to conceal or at least ignore this essential historical truth.

Sojourner Truth, who squelched the heckler with an oft-quoted speech. In the first place, she said, Jesus came from “God and a woman—man had nothing to do with it.”66 Secondly, Truth asserted that women were not inherently weak and helpless. Raising herself to her full height of six feet, flexing a muscled arm, and bellowing with a voice one observer likened to the apocalyptic thunders, Truth informed the audience that she could outwork, outeat, and outlast any man. Then she challenged: “Ain’t I a woman?”67

Active in the antislavery effort, helping enslaved persons, including Frederick Douglass, find safety in the North, the AME Zion Church also counted Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman as members. These abolitionists were believers who framed their powerful arguments for freedom and equality in the language of scripture and an uncorrupted Christianity.

Men tend to rebel when young and become more conservative with age, but women tend to be more conservative when young and become rebellious as we grow older. I’d noticed this pattern in the suffragist/ abolitionist era, when women over fifty, sixty, even seventy were a disproportionate number of the activists and leaders—think of Sojourner Truth and Susan B. Anthony, or Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Ida B. Wells—but I’d assumed it was due to the restrictions placed on younger women by uncontrolled childbirth and their status as household chattel: hard facts that limited all but a few single or widowed white women, and all but even fewer free women of color.

Black women's history is a tale of fierce determination, sass, and unyielding resilience. From Sojourner Truth's "Ain't I a Woman?" speech to Maya Angelou's poetic prowess, they've left a trail of fabulousness in their wake. With style, grace they've faced adversity head-on and emerged as queens of their own narratives. So let's raise a glass this February to the trailblazers, the game-changers, and the unsung heroes!

It reminds me of how often we educated, higher-class black people change the tone in our voices, like we’re getting ready to sing an old Negro spiritual anytime we quote from “Ain’t I a Woman.” Sojourner Truth never said “Ain’t I a Woman.” She said, “I am a woman’s rights.” The phrase that elucidates how Truth saw herself—an enslaved black woman—as central to any conversation America can have about the law. She did not need to be rich or privileged to do this. She did not ask anyone if she was human enough to be of consideration. Truth’s speech, which was published in the Anti-Slavery Bugle weeks after her extemporaneous delivery, was “translated” by a white female abolitionist twelve years later to sound like minstrel black English. The transcription from the Bugle looks nothing like “Ain’t I a Woman.” Truth’s speech was originally delivered, and printed, in scholarly American English. Yet, here we are, Truth inscribed in even our memories as some white person’s version of her. I think

Speciesism—the word is not an attractive one, but I can think of no better term—is a prejudice or attitude of bias in favor of the interests of members of one’s own species and against those of members of other species. It should be obvious that the fundamental objections to racism and sexism made by Thomas Jefferson and Sojourner Truth apply equally to speciesism. If possessing a higher degree of intelligence does not entitle one human to use another for his or her own ends, how can it entitle humans to exploit nonhumans for the same purpose?

Jane didn’t miss white folks, she didn’t like white folks, she tried not to think about them. She kept her world as colored as she could. There was enough of it. From Langston Hughes to Sojourner Truth, her children’s worlds were hardly deprived

The leader of the provocateurs had argued that it was ridiculous for women to desire the vote, since they could not even walk over a puddle or get into a carriage without the help of a man. Sojourner Truth pointed out with compelling simplicity that she herself had never been helped over mud puddles or into carriages. “And ain’t I a woman?

Many wanted to believe that every writer staying at the bookstore was another Hemingway in order to add that certain flare to their vacation. In truth, of the hundreds of poets and writers who pass through the bookstore every year, only a handful ever publish. But, with such bare pockets, Kurt and I saw no reason why we couldn’t indulge the fantasies.

There is a cliché about journalists being frustrated novelists, and perhaps there is some truth to it, because Dave was convinced he could leave business reporting behind and become another Bret Easton Ellis.

Truth? I don’t agree with Keats that truth is beauty and beauty is truth and that’s all you need to know. We need to know a hell of a lot more than that. But I do know that truth doesn’t do well without the help of beauty. It needs it so badly I think the world would collapse without it. Without it we couldn’t grasp things intuitively, things we could never express by intelligence.

Than love? Tell me what’s more important than love?” “Truth.” “Seems t’me if y’don’t got one, y’don’t got t’other.” To which there was no response.

All my life I’ve despised Jonah MacPhale”, said the old man. “But, you see, I was wrong. Each of us chooses one form of betrayal or another. Some betray people. Some betray the truth. We kill or steal or twist things up with a gun or a word, and all because we’re frightened little creatures. I can’t abandon Jonah to his fate. He is me, if you can understand, boy. And someone has to be there if his soul ever opens up long enough to ask why or cry out for help.

Nathaniel, there must be a counterforce to evil that unmasks it and shows it for what it is. There must be voices to proclaim the truth.