Sojourner Truth - Women's Rights National Historical Park (U.S. National Park Service)

The Former Slave Who Inspired a Nation | Sojourner Truth
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSaOPSdabKM

Images:
1. Sojourner Truth and Abraham Lincoln, Washington, D.C., October 29, 1864 -painted by Franklin C. Courter (1893)
2. Sojourner Truth 'I sell the shadow to support the substance' standing with cane as support.
3. Sojourner Truth 'I feel safe even in the midst of my enemies; for the truth is powerful and will prevail
4. Sojourner Truth memorial statue is a former small city park at the corner of Pine and Park Streets in Florence. Massachusetts

Background from {[https://newrepublic.com/article/123913/sojourner-truth-friend-of-freedom]}
Walter White/ May 24, 1948
Sojourner Truth: Friend of Freedom
The former slave left an indelible imprint on America, despite a series of tremendous obstacles.
Fredrick Douglass, the famous ex-slave, never forgot the night he gave his most pessimistic speech, in Boston’s Faneuil Hall. A packed house heard him lash the evils of slavery, then conclude hopelessly that the white people of America would never put an end to the Negro’s bondage. There was only one answer, he asserted gloomily, and that was an armed revolt by the slaves themselves, which could only result in wholesale slaughter.
Suddenly, at the rear of the speakers’ platform, a gaunt, shabbily dressed blade woman arose, her six feet of height almost dwarfing Douglass. In her enormously deep voice, which blared like a Boston Harbor foghorn, she roared at the speaker: “Frederick, is God dead?”
The startled Douglass, usually quick to retort to hecklers, was momentarily silenced; the equally surprised audience was the first to recover, and an avalanche of applause swept away the despair which had enveloped the hall. Sojourner Truth had saved the day.
Although virtually ignored by history, this black woman left an indelible imprint on her America despite a series of tremendous handicaps. Born as the slave Isabella, she never learned to read or write during a lifetime of at least 86 years (some authorities believe she live to the age of 106). Ridiculed for her awkward, homely appearance, she was sold five times as a slave, and until the day of her death, November 26, 1883, she had to contend with severe poverty and persecution. But she had a rebellious spirit that surmounted all obstacles. It was this insurgency which finally brought her freedom and led her to adopt the name Sojourner Truth—because of her self-appointed role as a traveler, or sojourner, to tell the truth about the degradation of slavery.

Even when, as a 10-year-old child, she was beaten by her owner, John Nealy, with such severity that she bore the scars the rest of her life, she became more rebellious instead of less so. Although she was small and sickly, the 200-pound Nealy thought it wise to tie little Isabella’s hands before beating her.
In times like this her refuge was a queer mixture of stubborn revolt against the cruelty of slavery and a deep religiosity, inherited from her mother, which bordered on mysticism. These were the driving—and sometimes conflicting—inner forces which drove this remarkable woman throughout her life.
________________________________________
The misfortunes of slavery, poverty, contumely and cruelty she believed to be the penalty for not having been as good a Christian as she should have been. But at the same time the burdens she bore progressively deepened her yearning to devote her life to helping to abolish slavery. When the third of her owners, John Dumont, sold Isabella’s five-year-old son (who, there is reason to believe, was one of five children fathered by Dumont), Isabella determined to regain the boy—the last of her brood, since the other four children had already been sold. Barefoot and penniless she walked the long miles from New Paltz to Kingston, New York, to plead so persistently and movingly with the grand jury that it ordered the child returned.
The embittered mother called upon her God to punish the Gedney family who had sold her child and laughed at her protests. When Fowler Gedney murdered his wife, and his mother-in-law went insane, the devout slave was both convinced of her power with her God and terrified at the terrible vengeance she felt she had brought upon her persecutors. “That’s too much, God,” she prayed, “I did not mean quite so much!”
Shortly afterwards Isabella obtained her freedom under a New York State law passed in 1817, under which the last of the state’s slaves were to be given their freedom by 1827.
She moved to New York City and found employment with a well-to-do merchant, Elijah Pierson, and his wife. Perhaps as an inevitable result of her deep faith and the episode of the Gedney family, she became a devoted follower of a religious mountebank. This was a shrewd, bearded fellow named Robert Matthews, who had renamed himself Mathias and claimed to be a direct descendant of Matthew of the New Testament.
He was not long in getting Isabella and the Piersons under his sway and soon had wangled a large sum of money from the Piersons and an even greater amount from their friend John Mills. He then blossomed out in flashy robes lined with pink silk and festooned with twelve elegant tassels emblematic of the twelve tribes of Israel and ordered his followers to turn over all their worldly goods to him for the establishment of Zion Hill, in which, subject to obedience to his will, they could find food and shelter.
Mathias decreed that he and he alone should decide whether his followers were spiritually “matched souls.” If they were not, he ordered married couples to separate. He took advantage of his edict to “unmatch”one pair of his followers and assume the conjugal privileges of the displaced husband with his comely wife. The faithful and hardworking Isabella, possibly because of her color, was the only member of the “Kingdom” who was not mated or remated by Mathias.
Disaster for the “Kingdom” and disillusion for Isabella came when relatives charged that Elijah Pierson had been poisoned after turning over all his wealth to Mathias. Others charged that Isabella, on orders from Mathias, had attempted to poison them too; the evidence must have been rather flimsy, however, because she was never indicted. With Isabella’s help—she employed his counsel—Mathias was acquitted. Later she filed suit for slander and collected $125.
________________________________________
Mathias disappeared, leaving the aging Isabella disillusioned and jobless but determined to reestablish her good name and devote the balance of her life to serving a God who was not carnal and to fighting the slavery and brutality which, were the lot even of free Negroes. The ways of city life where “the rich rob the poor and the poor rob one another” frightened and depressed her. She quit her job as servant and set out “about my Father’s business” of arousing the country against the physical bondage of slavery of Negroes, the political enslavement of women and the curse of strong drink. It was at this point she adopted the name of Sojourner Truth, which she asserted came to her as a vision from God as she walked one day in Brooklyn.
She strode into churches and other public meetings asking to be heard. Despite her ragged, unprepossessing appearance, there was something about her flashing eyes, the resonant voice that rumbled incongruously out of a woman’s body, and her obvious sincerity, which more often than not gained her permission to speak. Although wholly illiterate, her amazingly imaginative and poetic speech had an electric effect.
In 1851 a women’s-suffrage convention was assembled in Akron, Ohio, which Sojourner Truth attended. Everything seemed to go wrong with the meeting. A number of ministers had invaded the hall uninvited and monopolized the discussion, quoting Biblical texts to the effect that women should eschew all activities except those of child-bearing, homemaking and subservience to their husbands. Alice Felt Tyler in Freedom’s Ferment tells how Sojourner Truth delivered the baffled women from their adversaries. She had sat for several hours on the pulpit steps listening patiently to the masculine filibuster. Suddenly she boomed out of the hushed audience:
Wal’, children, where there is so much racket there must be somethin’ out of kilter. I think that ‘twixt the Negroes of the South and the women in the North, all talkin’ ‘bout rights, the white men will be in a pretty fix pretty soon. But what’s all this here talkin’ ‘bout?
That man over there say that women needs 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?
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 seem ‘em mos’ 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? Then that little man in black over there, he say women can’t have as much rights as men, ‘cause Christ wasn’t a woman. Where did your Christ come from? Where did your Christ come from? From God and a woman! Man had nothin’ to do with Him!”
The disruptive clergymen were silenced.
________________________________________
On another occasion she quieted a crowd of hoodlums at a meeting in Northampton, Massachusetts, by singing, telling stories of slavery, and preaching until she had changed the mood of the mob and exacted a promise to leave. From meal to meal she did not know where she would eat or where she would sleep, but such hardships never made her doubt her mission.
Her chief and almost sole source of income was the sale of inexpensive photographs of herself, which she offered with the remark, “I sells the shadow to support the substance.” Sometimes she was invited to stay at the homes of wealthy listeners; as likely as not she slept the next night in a barn. Once her color barred her from finding shelter in any place except the city jail. This she refused and walked out into the country to find a hayloft.
________________________________________
Indiana in the 1850’s was more pro-slavery than otherwise, having enacted a lay forbidding entry of Negroes into the state. But man-made laws held no terrors for Sojourner Truth.
She ignored warnings and threats against going into Indiana and managed to obtain permission to speak at a United Brethren meeting. Most of the overflow audience was made up of a mob led by a local physician. As she started to speak, the doctor shouted that she was an impostor, that in reality she was a man, as her deep baritone voice indicated. He demanded that she bare her breasts to a committee of women to prove her sex. Before she could answer, he demanded a vote on the question of whether she was male or female. By an overxyhelming majority the jeering audience voted that Sojourner Truth was a man.
Angered, Sojourner Truth ripped open her dress, shouting above the tumult: “My breasts have suckled many a white baby when they should have been sucklin’ my own. Some of those white babies is now grown men, and even though they have suckled my Negro breasts, they are far more manly than any of you. I show my breasts to the whole congregation. It ain’t my shame but yours that I should do this. Here, then, see for yourselves!”
She found her fame growing and preceding her wherever she went. “I never knew a person who possessed so much of that subtle, controlling power called presence as Sojourner Truth,” Harriet Beecher Stowe said of her. Wendell Phillips, himself a great orator, declared that in all his experience he had never known a person so able to electrify and move an audience with a few words as she.
It was undoubtedly true that she benefited from the fact that many if not most of her hearers had never heard a Negro speak before; and came to hear her because of the novelty of the experience. But there is much proof that she moved even the curious, and that her speeches measurably advanced the causes of abolition, women’s rights and temperance.
________________________________________
When the Civil War was imminent, she made her way to Washington where she was granted an appointment with President Lincoln. The two gaunt Americans found much in common in each other’s background of privation, and sat together for a long while as Sojourner Truth, abandoning her nonviolent creed, pleaded with Lincoln to enlist Northern free men of color to help fight the war. Time and time again she returned to the White House to renew her plea. Her arguments, combined with the manpower needs of the Union Army, eventually won over Lincoln and Congress. Sojourner Truth decided to remain in Washington. Here she worked night and day: nursing wounded soldiers and finding food and shelter for the homeless, half-naked, hungry, emancipated slaves who poured into the Capital.
________________________________________
The signing of the Emancipation Proclamation and the end of the war brought her happiness, but put no stop to her journeying. She had by now become an almost legendary figure. Where once she had had to beg to be heard, she now was increasingly deluged with invitations to speak to state legislatures, conventions, churches, women’s-rights and temperance meetings. Hallie Quinn Brown, who knew Sojourner Truth during the latter years of her life, described her in Homespun Heroines and Other Women of Distinction:
Presidents, Senators, judges, authors, lecturers—all were proud to grasp her hand and bid her godspeed on her noble mission ... In her exhortations for the cause of justice for her downtrodden race, she rose to the greatest heights of oratory. Her African dialect, quaint speeches and genial ways won for her an ever willing and interested audience. Her witty sayings would have made a volume in themselves, had they been preserved. Her keen wit and repartee were strong weapons in debate or argument.
But her popularity began to wane when she conceived and began to advocate a plan to settle Negroes on homestead land in the West. Already the North was turning its attention away from the distasteful days of the war toward the building of huge corporations and individual fortunes, some of them founded upon the exploitation of the apparently boundless resources of the West. The recently freed slaves showed little enthusiasm for her plan, and this puzzled and angered her.
Although her strength was failing, she refused to be deterred from her goal; she could not understand that this last dream of hers was impractical and even dangerous. She who had always fought to move her people into the main stream of life, now proposed to have them take themselves out of that main stream into a segregated and remote bayou. When despite her utmost efforts the colonization scheme in the West failed to materialize, she retired to the modest little home in Battle Creek, Michigan, which she had purchased with the aid of friends and from the sale of her photographs and of her autobiography.
________________________________________
Even in retirement, Sojourner never lost her fire, or her conviction that she had her own unique destiny. A last glimpse of this unquenchable spirit is provided by Hallie Quinn Brown’s description of Sojourner reminiscing over a long and turbulent life. A little girl who sat fascinated by the recital of apparently limitless history asked, “Sojourner, did you see Adam and Eve?”

FYI SSG Paul HeadleeCPL Michael PeckSgt (Join to see)PO1 Steve DittoCPL Douglas ChryslerSSG Michael Noll Maj Marty HoganSPC Michael Oles SRTSgt George RodriguezPO3 Charles Streich SGT (Join to see)SGT David A. 'Cowboy' GrothSFC (Join to see)SGT Steve McFarland PO1 H Gene LawrencePO2 Frederick Dunn SMSgt David A Asbury CSM (Join to see) SPC Nancy Greene TSgt David L.

Sojourner Truth
Sojourner Truth Quotes, Speech, Biography, Education, Facts, History.
Sojourner Truth (/soʊˈdʒɜːrnər ˈtruːθ/; born Isabella ("Bell") Baumfree; c. 1797 – November 26, 1883) was an African-American abolitionist and women's rights activist. Truth was born into slavery in Swartekill, Ulster County, New York, but escaped with her infant daughter to freedom in 1826. After going to court to recover her son, in 1828 she became the first black woman to win such a case against a white man.

She gave herself the name Sojourner Truth in 1843. Her best-known speech was delivered extemporaneously, in 1851, at the Ohio Women's Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio. The speech became widely known during the Civil War by the title "Ain't I a Woman?," a variation of the original speech re-written by someone else using a stereotypical Southern dialect; whereas Sojourner Truth was from New York and grew up speaking Dutch as her first language. During the Civil War, Truth helped recruit black troops for the Union Army; after the war, she tried unsuccessfully to secure land grants from the federal government for former slaves.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZaAQDyUmbJo

Images:
1. Sojourner Truth standing with cane as support
2. Sojourner Truth 'I am for keeping the thing going while things are stirring. Because if we wait till it is still, it will take a great while to get it going again.'
3. Sojourner Truth visits President Abraham Lincoln
4. Sojourner Truth 'Religion without humanity is very poor human stuff.'

Background from {[https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/sojourner-truth]} "Sojourner Truth 1797-1883
Edited by Debra Michals, PhD | 2015
A former slave, Sojourner Truth became an outspoken advocate for abolition, temperance, and civil and women’s rights in the nineteenth century. Her Civil War work earned her an invitation to meet President Abraham Lincoln in 1864.

Truth was born Isabella Bomfree, a slave in Dutch-speaking Ulster County, New York in 1797. She was bought and sold four times, and subjected to harsh physical labor and violent punishments. In her teens, she was united with another slave with whom she had five children, beginning in 1815. In 1827—a year before New York’s law freeing slaves was to take effect—Truth ran away with her infant Sophia to a nearby abolitionist family, the Van Wageners. The family bought her freedom for twenty dollars and helped Truth successfully sue for the return of her five-year-old-son Peter, who was illegally sold into slavery in Alabama.

Truth moved to New York City in 1828, where she worked for a local minister. By the early 1830s, she participated in the religious revivals that were sweeping the state and became a charismatic speaker. In 1843, she declared that the Spirit called on her to preach the truth, renaming herself Sojourner Truth.

As an itinerant preacher, Truth met abolitionists William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass. Garrison’s anti-slavery organization encouraged Truth to give speeches about the evils of slavery. She never learned to read or write. In 1850, she dictated what would become her autobiography—The Narrative of Sojourner Truth—to Olive Gilbert, who assisted in its publication. Truth survived on sales of the book, which also brought her national recognition. She met women’s rights activists, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, as well as temperance advocates—both causes she quickly championed.

In 1851, Truth began a lecture tour that included a women’s rights conference in Akron, Ohio, where she delivered her famous “Ain’t I a Woman?” speech. In it, she challenged prevailing notions of racial and gender inferiority and inequality by reminding listeners of her combined strength (Truth was nearly six feet tall) and female status. Truth ultimately split with Douglass, who believed suffrage for formerly enslaved men should come before women’s suffrage; she thought both should occur simultaneously.

During the 1850’s, Truth settled in Battle Creek, Michigan, where three of her daughters lived. She continued speaking nationally and helped slaves escape to freedom. When the Civil War started, Truth urged young men to join the Union cause and organized supplies for black troops. After the war, she was honored with an invitation to the White House and became involved with the Freedmen’s Bureau, helping freed slaves find jobs and build new lives. While in Washington, DC, she lobbied against segregation, and in the mid 1860s, when a streetcar conductor tried to violently block her from riding, she ensured his arrest and won her subsequent case. In the late 1860s, she collected thousands of signatures on a petition to provide former slaves with land, though Congress never took action. Nearly blind and deaf towards the end of her life, Truth spent her final years in Michigan."

FYI LTC John Shaw 1SG Steven ImermanGySgt Gary CordeiroSgt Jim BelanusSGM Bill FrazerSGT Randell Rose[SGT Denny EspinosaA1C Riley SandersSSgt Clare MaySSG Robert WebsterCSM Chuck StaffordPFC Craig KarshnerSFC (Join to see)SPC Nancy GreenePVT Mark Zehner Lt Col Charlie BrownSP5 Dennis Loberger SSG Robert Mark Odom 1LT Peter DustonSPC Woody Bullard

Sojourner Truth: Ain't I a Woman
An interview with Sojourner Truth as portrayed by Dr, Daisy Nelson Century, Historical Interpreter, Author and Educator. Through her talents we explore the world of slavery and abolition in the 1800's. You should not miss her recitation of 'Ain't I a Women'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFp7nj4-f6g


Images:
1. Sojourner Truth 'I sell the shadow to support the substance' sitting
2. Sojourner Truth '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 .jpg
3. Sojourner Truth 'I am not going to die, I'm going home like a shooting star.'

Background from {[https://www.pbs.org/thisfarbyfaith/people/sojourner_truth.html]}
How came Jesus into the world? Through God who created him and woman who bore him. Man, where is your part? But the women are coming up blessed by God and few of the men are coming up with them. But man is in a tight place, the poor slave is on him, woman is coming on him, and he is surely between a hawk an' a buzzard." --Sojourner Truth, addressing the 1851 Ohio Women's Convention, as recorded by Marius Robinson, secretary

Sojourner Truth was born in 1797 as Isabella, a Dutch-speaking slave in rural New York. Separated from her family at age nine, she was sold several times before ending up on the farm of John and Sally Dumont. As was the case for most slaves in the rural North, Isabella lived isolated from other African Americans, and she suffered from physical and sexual abuse at the hands of her masters. Inspired by her conversations with God, which she held alone in the woods, Isabella walked to freedom in 1826. Although tempted to return to Dumont's farm, she was struck by a vision of Jesus, during which she felt "baptized in the Holy Spirit," and she gained the strength and confidence to resist her former master. In this experience, Isabella was like countless African Americans who called on the supernatural for the power to survive injustice and oppression.

In 1828, Isabella moved to New York City and soon thereafter became a preacher in the "perfectionist," or pentecostal tradition. Her faith and preaching brought her into contact with abolitionists and women's rights crusaders, and Truth became a powerful speaker on both subjects. She traveled extensively as a lecturer, particularly after the publication of The Narrative of Sojourner Truth, which detailed her suffering as a slave. Her speeches were not political, but were based on her unique interpretation-as a woman and a former slave-of the Bible.

With the start of the Civil War, Truth became increasingly political in her work. She agitated for the inclusion of blacks in the Union Army, and, once they were permitted to join, volunteered by bringing them food and clothes. She became increasingly involved in the issue of women's suffrage, but broke with leaders Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton when Stanton stated that she would not support the black vote if women were not also granted the right. Truth also fought for land to resettle freed slaves, and she saw the 1879 Exodus to Kansas as part of God's divine plan. Truth's famous "Ar'n't I a Woman?" speech, delivered in 1851 at the Ohio Women's Rights Convention, is a perfect example of how, as Nell Painter puts it, "at a time when most Americans thought of slaves as male and women as white, Truth embodied a fact that still bears repeating: Among blacks are women; among the women, there are blacks."

"...the force that brought her from the soul murder of slavery into the authority of public advocacy was the power of the Holy Spirit. Her ability to call upon a supernatural power gave her a resource claimed by millions of black women and by disempowered people the world over. Without doubt, it was Truth's religious faith that transformed her from Isabella, domestic servant, into Sojourner Truth, a hero for three centuries at least." --Nell Painter, Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol

KEY MOMENTS OF FAITH

ISOLATION IN NEW YORK
Sojourner Truth was born Isabella, the youngest of 12 children, in Ulster County, NY, in 1797. When she was nine, Isabella was sold from her family to an English speaking-family called Neely. Like many black New Yorkers, Isabella spoke only Dutch. Her new owners beat her for not understanding their commands. She was sold twice more before arriving at the Dumont farm, at 14. There she toiled for 17 years. John Dumont beat her, and there is evidence that his wife, Sally, sexually abused her. Of this time in her life, Isabella wrote: "Now the war begun." It was a war both with her masters, and herself.

CALLED BY GOD TO FREEDOM
Alone on John Dumont's farm with little contact with other black New Yorkers, Isabella found her own ways to worship God. She built a temple of brush in the woods, an African tradition she may have learned from her mother, and bargained with God as if he were a familiar presence. Even though she had worked hard to please her master for 16 years, Isabella listened to God when He told her to walk away from slavery. With her baby, Sophia, Isabella left Dumont's farm in 1826 and walked to freedom.

BAPTIZED IN THE HOLY SPIRIT
Like thousands of slaves, free blacks, and poor whites in the early nineteenth century, Isabella was swept up by the tide the Second Great Awakening, a Protestant evangelical movement that emphasized living simply and following the Holy Spirit. In 1827, newly-free Isabella considered returning to the Dumont farm to attend Pinkster, a celebration of New York slaves. She was saved from joining her ex-master by a frightening vision of God, followed by the calming presence of an intercessor, whom Isabella recognized as Jesus. With Jesus as her "soul-protecting fortress," Isabella gained the power to rise "above the battlements of fear."

WITH THE POWER OF A NATION
In 1826, Isabella was living with the Van Wagenens, white Methodists, when she learned that her son, Peter, had been illegally sold into slavery in Alabama. An outraged Isabella had no money to regain her son, but with God on her side she said she felt "so tall within, as if the power of a nation was within [her]." She acquired money for legal fees, and filed a complaint with the Ulster County grand jury. Peter was returned to her in the spring of 1828, marking the first step in a life of activism inspired by religious faith.

TWO YEARS IN THE WILDERNESS
In the late 1820s, Isabella moved to New York City and lived among a community of Methodist Perfectionists, men and women who met outside of the church for ecstatic worship and emphasized living simply through the power of the Holy Spirit. Through the perfectionists, Isabella fell under the spell of the "Prophet Matthias," and lived with his cult from 1833 to 1834. This experience suggests that Isabella, although on her way to self-confidence and independence, still yearned for structure and family, but chose an abusive situation - Matthias often beat her - that felt familiar to her experience as John Dumont's slave.

THE BIRTH OF SOJOURNER TRUTH
While living in New York, Isabella attended the many camp meetings held around the city, and she quickly established herself as a powerful speaker, capable of converting many. In 1843, she was "called in spirit" on the day of Pentecost. The spirit instructed her to leave New York, a "second Sodom," and travel east to lecture under the name Sojourner Truth. This new name signified her role as an itinerant preacher, her preoccupation with truth and justice, and her mission to teach people "to embrace Jesus, and refrain from sin." Sojourner Truth set off on her journey during a period of millennial fervor, with many poised to hear her call to Jesus before the Day of Judgement.

IS GOD GONE?
Sojourner Truth first met the abolitionist Frederick Douglass while she was living at the Northampton Association. Although he admired her speaking ability, Douglass was patronizing of Truth, whom he saw as "uncultured." Years later, however, Truth would use her plain talk to challenge Douglass. At an 1852 meeting in Ohio, Douglass spoke of the need for blacks to seize freedom by force. As he sat down, Truth asked "Is God gone?" Although much exaggerated by Harriet Beecher Stowe and other writers, this exchange made Truth a symbol for faith in nonviolence and God's power to right the wrongs of slavery.

EXODUSTERS AS GOD'S DIVINE PLAN
The 1879 spontaneous exodus of tens of thousands of freedpeople from southern states to Kansas was the culmination of one of Sojourner Truth's most fervent prayers. After the Civil War, Truth had traveled to Washington to work among destitute freedpeople. Inspired by divine command, Truth began agitating for their resettlement to western lands. She drew up a petition (which probably never reached Congress, as intended) and traveled extensively, promoting her plan and collecting signatures. Truth saw the Exodusters, fleeing violence and abuse in the Reconstruction South, as evidence that God had a plan for African-Americans.

EMBRACING WOMEN'S SUFFRAGE
During the Civil War, Sojourner Truth took up the issue of women's suffrage. She was befriended by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, but disagreed with them on many issues, most notably Stanton's threat that she would not support the black vote if women were denied it. Although she remained supportive of women's suffrage throughout her life, Truth distanced herself from the increasingly racist language of the women's groups. Truth died on November 26, 1883. In her old age, she had let go of Pentecostal judgement and embraced spiritualism. Her last words were "be a follower of the Lord Jesus."

FYI LTC David BrownPO2 Frederick DunnCWO3 (Join to see)LTC Stephan PorterSSG Robert PrattTSgt George RodriguezSGM Major StroupeCWO3 Randy WestonSFC Richard WilliamsonSPC Daniel RankinMSG (Join to see)SSG Byron HewettCPT Richard TrioneA1C Riley SandersSSgt Clare MayLinda LawrenceSSG Bill McCoySP5 Gary NelsonSGT Herbert BollumSGT (Join to see)