sojourner truth biographical essay

Sojourner Truth

(1797-1883)

Who Was Sojourner Truth?

Sojourner Truth was an African American abolitionist and women's rights activist best-known for her speech on racial inequalities, "Ain't I a Woman?", delivered extemporaneously in 1851 at the Ohio Women's Rights Convention.

Truth was born into slavery but escaped with her infant daughter to freedom in 1826. She devoted her life to the abolitionist cause and helped to recruit Black troops for the Union Army. Although Truth began her career as an abolitionist, the reform causes she sponsored were broad and varied, including prison reform, property rights and universal suffrage.

Historians estimate that Truth (born Isabella Baumfree) was likely born around 1797 in the town of Swartekill, in Ulster County, New York. However, Truth's date of birth was not recorded, as was typical of children born into slavery.

Truth was one of as many as 12 children born to James and Elizabeth Baumfree. Her father, James Baumfree, was an enslaved person captured in modern-day Ghana. Her mother, Elizabeth Baumfree, also known as Mau-Mau Bet, was the daughter of enslaved people from Guinea.

Early Life as an Enslaved Person

The Baumfree family was owned by Colonel Hardenbergh, and lived at the colonel's estate in Esopus, New York, 95 miles north of New York City. The area had once been under Dutch control, and both the Baumfrees and the Hardenbaughs spoke Dutch in their daily lives.

After the colonel's death, ownership of the Baumfrees passed to his son, Charles. The Baumfrees were separated after the death of Charles Hardenbergh in 1806. The 9-year-old Truth, known as "Belle" at the time, was sold at an auction with a flock of sheep for $100. Her new owner was a man named John Neely, whom Truth remembered as harsh and violent.

Over the following two years, Truth would be sold twice more, finally coming to reside on the property of John Dumont at West Park, New York. It was during these years that Truth learned to speak English for the first time.

Sojourner Truth's Husband and Children

Around 1815, Truth fell in love with an enslaved person named Robert from a neighboring farm. The two had a daughter, Diana. Robert's owner forbade the relationship, since Diana and any subsequent children produced by the union would be the property of John Dumont rather than himself. Robert and Truth never saw each other again.

In 1817, Dumont compelled Truth to marry an older enslaved person named Thomas. The couple marriage resulted in a son, Peter, and two daughters, Elizabeth and Sophia.

Early Years of Freedom

The state of New York, which had begun to negotiate the abolition of slavery in 1799, emancipated all enslaved people on July 4, 1827. The shift did not come soon enough for Truth.

After John Dumont reneged on a promise to emancipate Truth in late 1826, she escaped to freedom with her infant daughter, Sophia. Her other daughter and son stayed behind.

Shortly after her escape, Truth learned that her son Peter, then 5 years old, had been illegally sold to a man in Alabama. She took the issue to court and eventually secured Peter's return from the South. The case was one of the first in which a Black woman successfully challenged a white man in a United States court.

Truth's early years of freedom were marked by several strange hardships. Truth converted to Christianity and moved with her son Peter to New York City in 1829, where she worked as a housekeeper for Christian evangelist Elijah Pierson. She then moved on to the home of Robert Matthews, also known as Prophet Matthias, for whom she also worked as a housekeeper. Matthews had a growing reputation as a con man and a cult leader.

Shortly after Truth changed households, Elijah Pierson died. Robert Matthews was accused of poisoning Pierson in order to benefit from his personal fortune, and the Folgers, a couple who were members of his cult, attempted to implicate Truth in the crime.

In the absence of adequate evidence, Matthews was acquitted. Because he had become a favorite subject of the penny press, he decided to move west. In 1835, Truth brought a slander suit against the Folgers and won.

After Truth's successful rescue of her son, Peter, from slavery in Alabama, mother and son stayed together until 1839. At that time, Peter took a job on a whaling ship called the Zone of Nantucket.

Truth received three letters from her son between 1840 and 1841. When the ship returned to port in 1842, however, Peter was not on board. Truth never heard from him again.

Abolition and Women's Rights

On June 1, 1843, Isabella Baumfree changed her name to Sojourner Truth and devoted her life to Methodism and the abolition of slavery.

In 1844, Truth joined the Northampton Association of Education and Industry in Northampton, Massachusetts. Founded by abolitionists, the organization supported a broad reform agenda including women's rights and pacifism. Members lived together on 500 acres as a self-sufficient community.

Truth met a number of leading abolitionists at Northampton, including William Lloyd Garrison , Frederick Douglass and David Ruggles. Although the Northampton community disbanded in 1846, Truth's career as an activist and reformer was just beginning.

In 1850, Truth spoke at the first National Women's Rights Convention in Worcester, Massachusetts. She soon began touring regularly with abolitionist George Thompson, speaking to large crowds on the subjects of slavery and human rights.

As Truth's reputation grew and the abolition movement gained momentum, she drew increasingly larger and more hospitable audiences. She was one of several escaped enslaved people, along with Douglass and Harriet Tubman , to rise to prominence as an abolitionist leader and a testament to the humanity of enslaved people.

'The Narrative of Sojourner Truth: A Northern Slave'

Truth’s memoirs were published under the title The Narrative of Sojourner Truth: A Northern Slave in 1850.

Truth dictated her recollections to a friend, Olive Gilbert, since she could not read or write. Garrison wrote the book's preface.

DOWNLOAD BIOGRAPHY'S SOJOURNER TRUTH FACT CARD

'Ain't I a Woman?' Speech

In May 1851, Truth delivered an improvised speech at the Ohio Women's Rights Convention in Akron that would come to be known as "Ain't I a Woman?" The first version of the speech was published a month later by Marius Robinson, editor of Ohio newspaper The Anti-Slavery Bugle , who had attended the convention and recorded Truth's words himself. It did not include the question "Ain't I a woman?" even once.

"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 your Christ come from? From God and a woman! Man had nothing to do with Him. " 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." —Sojourner Truth

The famous phrase would appear in print 12 years later, as the refrain of a Southern-tinged version of the speech. It is unlikely that Truth, a native of New York whose first language was Dutch, would have spoken in this Southern idiom.

Even in abolitionist circles, some of Truth's opinions were considered radical. She sought political equality for all women and chastised the abolitionist community for failing to seek civil rights for Black women as well as men. She openly expressed concern that the movement would fizzle after achieving victories for Black men, leaving both white and Black women without suffrage and other key political rights.

Advocacy During the Civil War

Truth put her growing reputation as an abolitionist to work during the Civil War , helping to recruit Black troops for the Union Army. She encouraged her grandson, James Caldwell, to enlist in the 54th Massachusetts Regiment.

In 1864, Truth was called to Washington, D.C., to contribute to the National Freedman's Relief Association. On at least one occasion, Truth met and spoke with President Abraham Lincoln about her beliefs and her experience.

True to her broad reform ideals, Truth continued to agitate for change even after Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation . In 1865, Truth attempted to force the desegregation of streetcars in Washington by riding in cars designated for white people.

A major project of Truth’s later life was the movement to secure land grants from the federal government for former enslaved people. She argued that ownership of private property, and particularly land, would give African Americans self-sufficiency and free them from a kind of indentured servitude to wealthy landowners. Although Truth pursued this goal forcefully for many years, she was unable to sway Congress.

Until old age intervened, Truth continued to speak passionately on the subjects of women's rights, universal suffrage and prison reform. She was also an outspoken opponent of capital punishment, testifying before the Michigan state legislature against the practice. She also championed prison reform in Michigan and across the country.

While always controversial, Truth was embraced by a community of reformers including Amy Post, Wendell Phillips, Garrison, Lucretia Mott and Susan B. Anthony — friends with whom she collaborated until the end of her life.

Accomplishments

Truth is remembered as one of the foremost leaders of the abolition movement and an early advocate of women's rights. Abolition was one of the few causes that Truth was able to see realized in her lifetime. The 19th Amendment, which enabled women to vote, was not ratified until 1920, nearly four decades after Truth's death.

Truth died at her home in Battle Creek, Michigan, on November 26, 1883. She is buried alongside her family at Battle Creek's Oak Hill Cemetery.

Sojourner Truth House and Library

The Sojourner Truth Library is located at the State University of New York New Paltz, in New Paltz, New York. In 1970, the library was named in honor of the abolitionist and feminist.

The Sojourner Truth House is a nonprofit organization sponsored by the Poor Handmaids of Jesus Christ located in Gary, Indiana. Founded in 1997, the organization serves homeless and at-risk women and their children by providing shelters, housing assistance, therapeutic programs and a food pantry.

QUICK FACTS

• Name: Sojourner Truth
• Birth Year: 1797
• Birth State: New York
• Birth City: Swartekill, Ulster County
• Birth Country: United States
• Gender: Female
• Best Known For: Abolitionist and women's rights activist Sojourner Truth is best known for her speech on racial inequalities, "Ain't I a Woman?" delivered at the Ohio Women's Rights Convention in 1851.
• Civil Rights
• Interesting Facts
• Sojourner Truth was sold at an auction at the age of nine, along with a flock of sheep, for $100.
• Truth was one of the first Black women to successfully challenge a white man in a United States court.
• Truth, along with Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman, was one of several escaped enslaved people to rise to prominence as an abolitionist leader and a testament to the humanity of enslaved people.
• Death Year: 1883
• Death date: November 26, 1883
• Death State: Michigan
• Death City: Battle Creek
• Death Country: United States

We strive for accuracy and fairness.If you see something that doesn't look right, contact us !

CITATION INFORMATION

• Article Title: Sojourner Truth Biography
• Author: Biography.com Editors
• Website Name: The Biography.com website
• Url: https://www.biography.com/activists/sojourner-truth
• Access Date:
• Publisher: A&E; Television Networks
• Last Updated: January 6, 2021
• Original Published Date: April 3, 2014
• Those are the same stars, and that is the same moon, that look down upon your brothers and sisters, and which they see as they look up to them, though they are ever so far away from us, and each other.
• It is the mind that makes the body.
• I am not going to die; I'm going home like a shooting star.
• Truth is powerful, and it prevails.
• If my cup won't hold but a pint, and yours holds a quart, wouldn't you be mean not to let me have my little half measure full?
• 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!
• I have borne 13 children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me!
• Religion without humanity is poor human stuff.
• How came Jesus into the world? Through God who created him and woman who bore him. Man, where is your part?
• We had been taught that we was a species of monkey, baboon or 'rang-o-tang, and we believed it, [but] some years ago there appeared to me a form ... Then I learned that I was a human being.
• It is hard for the old slaveholding spirit to die, but die it must.
• I did not run away, I walked away by daylight.
• I went to the Lord and asked Him to give me a new name. And the Lord gave me Sojourner, because I was to travel up and down the land, showing the people their sins, and being a sign unto them.
• If the Lord comes and burns—as you say he will—I am not going away; I am going to stay here and stand the fire ... And Jesus will walk with me through the fire, and keep me from harm.

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Sojourner Truth

By: History.com Editors

Updated: February 20, 2024 | Original: October 29, 2009

Sojourner Truth was an African American evangelist, abolitionist, women’s rights activist and author who was born into slavery before escaping to freedom in 1826. After gaining her freedom, Truth preached about abolitionism and equal rights for all. She became known for a speech with the famous refrain, "Ain't I a Woman? " that she was said to have delivered at a women's convention in Ohio in 1851, although accounts of that speech (and whether Truth ever used that refrain) have since been challenged by historians. Truth continued her crusade throughout her adult life, earning an audience with President Abraham Lincoln and becoming one of the world’s best-known human rights crusaders.

Who Was Sojourner Truth?

Sojourner Truth was born Isabella Baumfree in 1797 to enslaved parents James and Elizabeth Baumfree, in Ulster County, New York . Around age nine, she was sold at an auction to John Neely for $100, along with a flock of sheep.

Neely was a cruel and violent master who beat the young girl regularly. She was sold two more times by age 13 and ultimately ended up at the West Park, New York, home of John Dumont and his second wife Elizabeth.

Around age 18, Isabella fell in love with an enslaved man named Robert from a nearby farm. But the couple was not allowed to marry since they had separate owners. Instead, Isabella was forced to marry another enslaved man owned by Dumont named Thomas. She eventually bore five children: James, Diana, Peter, Elizabeth and Sophia.

Walking from Slavery to Freedom

At the turn of the 19th century, New York started legislating emancipation, but it would take over two decades for liberation to come for all enslaved people in the state.

In the meantime, Dumont promised Isabella he’d grant her freedom on July 4, 1826, “if she would do well and be faithful.” When the date arrived, however, he had a change of heart and refused to let her go.

Incensed, Isabella completed what she felt was her obligation to Dumont and then escaped his clutches, infant daughter in tow. She later said, “I did not run off, for I thought that wicked, but I walked off, believing that to be all right.”

In what must have been a gut-wrenching choice, she left her other children behind because they were still legally bound to Dumont.

Isabella made her way to New Paltz, New York, where she and her daughter were taken in as free people by Isaac and Maria Van Wagenen. When Dumont came to reclaim his “property,” the Van Wagenens offered to buy Isabella’s services from him for $20 until the New York Anti-Slavery Law emancipating all enslaved people took effect in 1827; Dumont agreed.

Sojourner Truth, First Black Woman to Sue White Man–And Win 

After the New York Anti-Slavery Law was passed, Dumont illegally sold Isabella’s five-year-old son Peter. With the help of the Van Wagenens, she filed a lawsuit to get him back.

Months later, Isabella won her case and regained custody of her son. She was the first Black woman to sue a white man in a United States court and prevail.

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Sojourner Truth's Spiritual Calling

The Van Wagenens had a profound impact on Isabella’s spirituality and she became a fervent Christian. In 1829, she moved to New York City with Peter to work as a housekeeper for evangelist preacher Elijah Pierson.

She left Pierson three years later to work for another preacher, Robert Matthews. When Elijah Pierson died, Isabella and Matthews were accused of poisoning him and of theft but were eventually acquitted.

Living among people of faith only emboldened Isabella’s devoutness to Christianity and her desire to preach and win converts. In 1843, with what she believed was her religious obligation to go forth and speak the truth, she changed her name to Sojourner Truth and embarked on a journey to preach the gospel and speak out against slavery and oppression.

'Ain’t I A Woman?' Speech and Controversy

In 1844, Truth joined a Massachusetts abolitionist organization called the Northampton Association of Education and Industry, where she met leading abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass and effectively launched her career as an equal rights activist.

Among Truth's contributions to the abolitionist movement was the speech she delivered at the Ohio Women’s Rights Convention in 1851, where she spoke powerfully about equal rights for Black women. Twelve years later, Frances Gage, a white abolitionist and president of the Convention, published an account of Truth’s words in the National Anti-Slavery Standard . In her account, Gage wrote that Truth used the rhetorical question, “Ar’n’t I a Woman?” to point out the discrimination Truth experienced as a Black woman. 

Various details in Gage's account, however, including that Truth said she had 13 children (she had five) and that she spoke in dialect have since cast doubt on its accuracy. Contemporaneous reports of Truth’s speech did not include this slogan and quoted Truth in standard English. In later years, this slogan was further distorted to “Ain’t I a Woman?”, reflecting the false belief that as a formerly enslaved woman, Truth would have had a Southern accent. Truth was, in fact, a proud New Yorker.

There is little doubt, nonetheless, that Truth's speech—and many others she gave throughout her adult life—moved audiences. Another account of Truth's 1851 speech, published in a newspaper about a month later, reported her saying, "I have plowed and reaped and husked and chopped and mowed, and can any man do more than that?"

Truth's powerful rhetoric won her audiences with leading women’s rights activists of her day, including  Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony .

Sojourner Truth During the Civil War

Like another famous escaped enslaved woman, Harriet Tubman , Truth helped recruit Black soldiers during the Civil War . She worked in Washington, D.C. , for the National Freedman’s Relief Association and rallied people to donate food, clothes and other supplies to Black refugees.

Her activism for the abolitionist movement gained the attention of President Abraham Lincoln , who invited her to the White House in October 1864 and showed her a Bible given to him by African Americans in Baltimore.

While Truth was in Washington, she put her courage and disdain for segregation on display by riding on whites-only streetcars. When the Civil War ended, she tried exhaustively to find jobs for freed Black Americans weighed down with poverty.

Later, she unsuccessfully petitioned the government to resettle formerly enslaved people on government land in the West.

Sojourner Truth Quotes

“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.”

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 ministers and churches—we wish to be shown where it can be found.”

“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.”

Sojourner Truth’s Later Years

In 1867, Truth moved to Battle Creek, Michigan , where some of her daughters lived. She continued to speak out against discrimination and in favor of woman’s suffrage . She was especially concerned that some civil rights leaders such as Frederick Douglass felt equal rights for Black men took precedence over those of Black women.

Truth died at home on November 26, 1883. Records show she was age 86, yet her memorial tombstone states she was 105. Engraved on her tombstone are the words, “Is God Dead?” a question she once asked a despondent Frederick Douglass to remind him to have faith.

Truth left behind a legacy of courage, faith and fighting for what’s right and honorable, but she also left a legacy of words and songs including her autobiography, The Narrative of Sojourner Truth , which she dictated in 1850 to Olive Gilbert since she never learned to read or write.

Perhaps Truth’s life of Christianity and fighting for equality is best summed up by her own words in 1863: “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 colored children as well as white children? And did not the same Savior die to save the one as well as the other?”

Sojourner Truth: Ain’t I A Woman? National Park Service.

Sojourner Truth: A Life of Legacy and Faith. Sojourner Truth Institute.

Sojourner Truth Meets Abraham Lincoln—On Equal Ground. Biography.

Sojourner Truth. National Park Service.

Sojourner Truth. WHMN: National Women’s History Museum.

Sojourner’s Words and Music. Sojourner Truth Memorial Committee.

Truth, Sojourner. American National Biography.

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Sojourner Truth

A formerly enslaved woman, 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 in Dutch-speaking Ulster County, New York in 1797. Born into slavery, her enslavers bought and sold Truth four times, and subjected her to harsh physical labor and violent punishments. In her teens, she was united with another enslaved man with whom she had five children, beginning in 1815. In 1827—a year before New York’s law freeing enslaved people 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 enslaved people 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 the formerly enslaved 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 formerly enslaved people with land, though Congress never took action. Nearly blind and deaf towards the end of her life, Truth spent her final years in Michigan.

• Folsom, Burton W. “Black History Month: The Crusade of Sojourner Truth,” Mackinac Center for Public Policy.  Last modified February 1, 1999.
• Gillis, Jennifer Blizin. Sojourner Truth. Chicago, Illinois: Heinemann Library, 2006.
• Library of Congress. “Today in History: November 26.” Accessed October 14, 2014.
• Painter, Nell Irvin. Sojourner Truth: a Life, a Symbol. New York: W.W. Norton, 1996.
• Redding, Saunders. “Sojourner Truth” in James, Edward T., Janet Wilson James, Paul S. Boyer. Notable American Women: 1607-1950, A Biographical Dictionary . Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1971.
• “This Far by Faith: Sojourner Truth.” PBS.com. Accessed October 14, 2014.
• Weatherford, Doris. American Women’s History: An A to Z of People, Organizations, Issues, and Events . New York: Macmillan General Reference, 1994.
• PHOTO: Library of Congress

MLA - Michals, Debra.  "Sojourner Truth."  National Women's History Museum.  National Women's History Museum, 2015.  Date accessed.

Chicago - Michals, Debra.  "Sojourner Truth."  National Women's History Museum. 2015.  www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/sojourner-truth.  

Library of Congress

Sojourner Truth Memorial

Books/Articles:

Bernard, Jacqueline. Journey Toward Freedom: The Story of Sojourner Truth. New York: Feminist Press, 1990.

Butler, Mary G. “Sojourner Truth: A Legacy of Life and Faith.” Sojourner Truth Institute of Battle Creek.

David, Linda and Erlene Stetson. Glorying in Tribulation: The Lifework of Sojourner Truth. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1994.

Krass, Peter. Sojourner Truth . New York: Chelsea House, 1988.

Mabee, Carleton and Susan Mabee Newhouse. Sojourner Truth - Slave, Prophet, Legend. New York: New York University Press, 1993.

Ortiz, Victoria. Sojourner Truth . Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1974.

Painter, Nell Irvin, ed. The Narrative of Sojourner Truth. New York: Penguin Books, 1998.

Olive Gilbert, ed.   The Narrative of Sojourner Truth. Boston: Printed for the Author, J. Yerrinton & Sons, 1850.

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The Remarkable Untold Story of Sojourner Truth

Feminist. Preacher. Abolitionist. Civil rights pioneer. Now the full story of the American icon’s life and faith is finally coming to light

A close-up of Sojourner Truth’s face in statue created by Woodrow Nash. An 1883 New York Times obituary described Truth’s “tall, masculine-looking figure” and “deep, guttural, powerful voice.”

By Cynthia Greenlee

Photographs by Maddie McGarvey

On May 29, 1851, a woman asked to address the attendees of the Ohio Women’s Rights Convention in Akron. She cut a striking figure, close to six feet tall even without her crisp bonnet. She was more than likely the only Black person in the room.

A procession of participants had already sounded off about the plight and potential of the “fairer sex” during the two-day gathering. “We are told that woman has never excelled in philosophy or any of the branches of mathematics,” said abolitionist Emily Rakestraw Robinson before noting that women were largely barred from higher education. Lura Maria Giddings lamented: “The degraded, vicious man, who scarcely knows his right hand from his left, is permitted to vote, while females of the most elevated intelligence are entirely excluded.” A dispatch about women’s labor from Paulina W. Davis, who would later create the women’s rights periodical The Una , painted a verbal picture of “mother and sister toiling like Southern slaves, early and late, for a son who sleeps on the downiest couch, wears the finest linen and spends his hundreds of dollars in a wild college life.”

Yet the only speaker from that day who attained near-mythical status was Sojourner Truth, a formerly enslaved traveling preacher from New York State. What exactly she said remains an unknowable mystery; the accounts vary significantly. But all versions of her remarks make one thing clear: Sojourner Truth challenged the idea of women’s inferiority. By her words and nonpareil presence, she pushed attendees to see her womanhood and her humanity, categories typically denied to antebellum Black people, slave or free.

The most circulated version of her speech—published by the conference chair Frances Gage 12 years later—quoted Truth as repeating the question “Ar’n’t I a woman?” while allegedly baring her arm in a show of muscle. Since that day, Sojourner Truth has been known almost entirely for the refrain of that speech. Few people realize that she went on to meet President Lincoln, hobnob with Uncle Tom’s Cabin author Harriet Beecher Stowe and advocate for government land grants for freedpeople after the Civil War. Her longevity as an evangelist and activist—with four decades of work for Christianity, abolition, suffrage and Black freedom movements—transcends the soundbite from the Akron convention.

Today, scholars, community organizers and Truth’s own descendants are working to bring a more complex version of her to an American public used to simplistic versions of the past.

The woman who would be known as Sojourner Truth was born enslaved as Isabella Baumfree sometime in the late 1790s in New York. By the time of the Akron convention, she had become a fixture on the antislavery lecture circuit, with the help of antislavery advocate and newspaper editor William Lloyd Garrison. She provided a plain-spoken, female contrast to the dashing and erudite Frederick Douglass, though like him, she labored to control her own story. Unable to read and write, Sojourner Truth was far from mute or ignorant. She published an autobiography, https://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/truth/1850/1850.html https://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/truth/1850/1850.html , the year before she spoke in Akron, and she sold copies of it at the convention.

The book shared her remarkable story of self-possession under the most dehumanizing circumstances. After her second master’s death, she was sold over and over, once bundled with sheep as a package deal. In 1826, after her master broke a promise to free her, she walked her way out of slavery, traveling a road through Ulster County, while carrying her infant daughter, Sophia, and a few worldly goods. She similarly walked to the village of Kingston to file a lawsuit reclaiming her young son, Peter, who’d been sold illegally into slavery in Alabama after New York enacted a gradual emancipation law. She was able to raise money from Quaker abolitionists to pay for a lawyer, and, remarkably, she succeeded. The court ordered the Alabama enslaver to return her son, though her memoir describes her horror at his condition: “From the crown of his head to the sole of his foot, the callosities and indurations on his entire body were most frightful to behold.”

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And then there was the vision: Early in life, she said she experienced a flash that affirmed God’s omnipresence and her connection with this higher power. That revelation drove her into a series of religious communities. In New York City, she worked as a domestic for the self-proclaimed prophet Matthias (originally named Robert Matthews), who was notorious for dubious sexual and financial practices in his “kingdom.” Accused of poisoning members of the cult, Truth sued again in 1835—this time successfully for slander. Free-thinking publisher Gilbert Vale was so swayed by her frankness—and ability to provide “receipts”—that he named her in his account of the cult’s bizarre inner workings: Fanaticism: Its Source and Influence, Illustrated by the Simple Narrative of Isabella, in the Case of Matthias .

By 1843, she’d renamed herself Sojourner Truth, divinely inspired to “travel up and down the land showing people their sins and being a sign to them.” At a camp meeting in Northampton, Massachusetts, she sang a rowdy crowd of young men into submission. Ruffians and the prospect of racial violence never seemed to scare her for long. She took the risk of venturing into Ohio, where the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was being actively implemented. During an 1858 visit to Indiana, a nominally free state that nonetheless discouraged Black people from settling there, she bared her breast to silence a heckler who charged that she was a man in disguise. A later trip to the state during the Civil War landed her in court for breaking a law that forbade African Americans from coming to Indiana, though she was never convicted.

Her fearlessness and humor ensured Sojourner Truth a kind of immortality in the popular imagination. Her image peered from a postage stamp in 1986, flew across the stratosphere on the wings of a Norwegian Air plane in 2017, and adorned a Google Doodle two years later. Libraries, museums, T-shirts, public housing complexes and a Mars space rover carry her name. She made an appearance on the Apple TV+ dramedy “Dickinson” as a spry 60-year-old who sported a scarlet dress.

During her lifetime, Truth was savvy about her own image. She commissioned photographs of herself when the visual technology was in its infancy and sold picture cards with the astute slogan, “I sell the shadow to support the substance.”

Critics derided her as a “negro wench” and mocked her insights as ridiculous pretense. But Truth was an effective lecturer on the abolitionist circuit. As her renown increased, the media amassed a vast collection of anecdotes, brimming with rhetorical brilliance. Her very quotability and array of interests were both her boon and her bane. It’s hard to capture the breadth of a woman who straddled various movements for decades—much easier to remember her for a four-word quote she almost certainly never said.

In the early 20th century, Black scholars included Truth in volumes profiling great African Americans. She was featured in the 1914 book The Negro in American History and the 1926 collection Homespun Heroines and Other Women of Distinction . In the 1960s and 1970s, second-wave feminists began invoking her in their (often failed) efforts to unite gender and race. By 1972, when her Akron speech appeared in the anthology Feminism: The Essential Historical Writings , the catchphrase had been subtly modernized to “Ain’t I a woman?” The revered feminist author bell hooks used that phrase as the title for her influential 1981 book about the specific kinds of oppression faced by Black women, as did historian Deborah Gray White with her 1985 study Ar’n’t I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South .

Nell Irvin Painter , a professor emerita of American history at Princeton University and a visual artist, published her landmark book Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol in 1996, a time when women’s studies and Black studies were gaining firmer footholds at American colleges and universities. But her book on Truth met with a curious critical silence, even after she’d written a string of other well-regarded books. The prominent Women’s Review of Books did not review it. Her fellow literary scholar and friend Nellie McKay made some inquiries at the journal and reported to Painter that a couple of reviewers “had trouble with the book.” In a forthcoming book called I Just Keep Talking: A Life in Essays , Painter identifies the probable source of that trouble: “my insistence, my exceedingly painstaking documentation, that Sojourner Truth did not say, ‘Ar’n’t/Ain’t I a woman?’”

Painter still voices frustration about the way this phrase worked its way into the feminist canon. Gage’s “memory” of the speech has Truth speaking in the ventriloquized dialect that 19th-century white authors often put in the mouths of African Americans. Her version begins like this: “Well, chillen, whar dar’s so much racket dar must be som’ting out o’kilter.” These words seem to situate Truth among the enslaved of the South, a region to which she is never known to have traveled until after the Civil War.

Sojourner Truth wasn’t Southern, and English wasn’t even her mother tongue.

Truth was born enslaved by Dutch-speaking New Yorkers, one category of near-forgotten slaveholder inside another nearly forgotten category: Northerners. New Netherland—a colony that included much of today’s New York State—was once the North American outpost of a global Dutch empire. Ghana’s infamous Elmina Castle, where captive Africans were held before leaving the continent for the Middle Passage, was in Dutch possession for more than 200 years. Amsterdam refineries used Suriname’s plantations to produce the sugar that fed the European sweet tooth.

In 1664, the English took over the province of New Amsterdam and renamed it New York, but both slavery and the Dutch language persisted for many generations, particularly in the Hudson Valley, where Truth grew up. About 40 percent of households in colonial New York City included a bondsperson. Runaway slave ads were sometimes in Dutch or frequently noted the Dutch or English fluency of the fugitives.

In Truth’s upstate New York, wealthy Dutch American families flaunted their slaveholding privilege. The powerful Van Rensselaers of Albany showed off their wealth in a 1730s portrait of a white child of the family, lounging on a cushion. Seated behind him is a Black child or young man whose skin nearly blends in with the background. In 1810, a group of men in New Paltz, Truth’s old stomping grounds, founded the Society for Negroes Unsettled, a slaveholders’ collective that pooled funds for members to hunt down their runaway slaves.

There are other reasons to doubt Gage’s recall. Her version has Truth saying she had 13 children, though she was known to have just 5. (While still enslaved, Truth married an older enslaved man who fathered at least three of her children. The paternity of the other two has been disputed, and one may have been the result of rape.) Gage’s version also has her using an anti-Black racial epithet and repeating the phrase “Ar’n’t I a woman?” as a powerful refrain. But contemporaneous accounts don’t include the phrase at all.

Weeks after the convention, Truth’s friend Marius Robinson, the editor of the Anti-Slavery Bugle , published his own transcript of the speech. Like Gage, he has Sojourner Truth insisting that she had worked and eaten as much as a man, but the wording and style are very different. Robinson quotes her saying: “And how came Jesus into the world? Through God who created him and woman who bore him. Man, where is your part?” Gage’s version goes like this: “Den dat little man in black dar, he say women can’t have as much rights as man ’cause Christ wa’n’t a woman. Whar did your Christ come from? From God and a woman. Man had nothing to do with him.”

Truth resented being misrepresented in the papers, as the Bloomington, Illinois, newspaper the Pantagraph reported in 1879: “Sojourner also prides herself on a fairly correct English, which is in all senses is [sic] a foreign tongue to her, she having spent her early years among people speaking ‘Low Dutch. NY.’ People who report her often exaggerate her expressions, putting into her mouth the most marked Southern dialect, which Sojourner feels is rather taking an unfair advantage of her.” Those who promoted the “Ain’t I a woman?” speech apparently never got the memo.

Painter remains firm in her conviction that Robinson’s account is more accurate than Gage’s. Truth often stayed at Robinson’s home when in Ohio, and she may have even vetted his version before it appeared in the newspaper. In the meantime, Painter is working on yet another book about Truth, with the emphatic title Sojourner Truth Was a New Yorker and She Didn’t Say That .

Before Sojourner Truth had her religious awakening, she used to speak to God in a familiar way, telling him every detail of her suffering. Then she’d demand: “Do you think that’s right, God?”

Then one day, after she’d walked away from slavery and found employment with a neighboring family called the Van Wagenens, she had a vision. As her dictated memoir recounted: “God revealed himself to her, with all the suddenness of a flash of lightning, showing her, ‘in the twinkling of an eye, that he was all over’—that he pervaded the universe—‘and that there was no place where God was not.’”

Truth was overwhelmed with shame at the colloquial tone of her earlier prayers. She’d always thought of Jesus as a distant figure, “like a Washington or a Lafayette,” but now “he appeared to her delighted mental vision as so mild, so good, and so every way lovely, and he loved her so much!”

Thus began a long string of residence in religious households or communities. These groups were forged in the foment of the Second Great Awakening, when idiosyncratic Christian sects abounded. “She started off as a sort of evangelical Methodist,” Painter said. “And then she was a perfectionist”—a religious persuasion in which people believed they could become free of sin. “Then, she went to New York City. She was with these upper room groups”—prayer revival meetings that started in an upper room of Manhattan’s North Reformed Dutch Church and then spread all over the city. Truth moved in and out of spiritualist circles, befriending people who sought communication with the dead.

“Many Americans are like that, who move through phases in their belief history,” said Painter, reflecting on the 19th century. “But the big thing, I think, was that she spent so much of her religious time with non-Black people. So it’s hard to see her as, say, the forerunner of the Nation of Islam” or other Black religious systems in America.

Barbara Allen, Truth’s sixth-generation granddaughter, has written two children’s books, including Remembering Great-Grandma Sojourner Truth . Allen herself has traveled through denominations—she has been Pentecostal, and also Methodist, like her ancestor, and is now nondenominational. She says that the memory of Sojourner Truth has been effectively secularized because religious fervor has become such a divisive topic. “A lot of people don’t want to offend other people, so they try to overlook that part,” Allen says. “Because everybody loves Sojourner.”

Yet the charismatic language of faith that Truth spoke gained her entree to talk to white Americans with religious social justice bents. From New York City, she walked to Connecticut, where she impressed what her memoir calls “a spiritually minded brother in Bristol.” The man found her so riveting that he asked her to go speak to a group he knew in Hartford, giving her a note to pass along: “I send you this living messenger, as I believe her to be one that God loves. … Please receive her, and she will tell you some new things. Let her tell her story without interrupting her, and give close attention, and you will see she has got the lever of truth.”

By 1844, Truth was craving a quiet place where she could rest for a while. Her new friends in New England connected her with the Northampton Association of Education and Industry, a utopian commune in Massachusetts based on the equality of all races, genders and religions. Everything was communally owned and funded by a silk mill. This suited Truth. According to her memoir, by the time she left New York City, she’d concluded that “the rich rob the poor, and the poor rob one another.”

In Northampton, Truth met Olive Gilbert, who would go on to transcribe Truth’s autobiography in the late 1840s. (Painter describes it as a “celebrity as-told-to” memoir.) She also met Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison, the editor of the antislavery paper The Liberator . With encouragement, she then started giving antislavery speeches on programs with celebrated orators.

Two years after the Akron convention, in 1853, Truth spoke at a convention on women’s rights in New York City. According to an account later published by suffragist leaders Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Matilda Gage, Harriot Stanton Blatch and Ida Harper, crowds of jeering men confronted Truth when she took the stage. “Sojourner combined in herself, as an individual, the two most hated elements of humanity,” the suffragist authors wrote. “She was black, and she was a woman, and all the insults that could be cast upon color and sex were together hurled at her; but there she stood, calm and dignified, a grand, wise woman, who could neither read nor write, and yet with deep insight could penetrate the very soul of the universe about her.”

According to the authors, Truth confronted the jeering men, telling them: “Is it not good for me to come and draw forth a spirit, to see what kind of spirit people are of?” Ever fond of the animal metaphor, she continued, “I see that some of you have got the spirit of a goose, and some have got the spirit of a snake.” From there, she went on to tell the biblical story of Queen Esther, concluding “Women don’t get half as much rights as they ought to; we want more, and we will have it.”

In 1857, Truth moved to Michigan, where she joined a community of progressive Quakers called Harmonia. Nothing remains of the town apart from its cemetery—its residents relocated after a tornado. Not long ago, a postal worker named Kevin Ailes in nearby Bangor, Michigan, was able to find the approximate location of Truth’s former home. An expert diver who’s located shipwrecks in the Great Lakes, Ailes consulted an 1873 map of Harmonia and saw that Truth had owned three plots, including the former sanctuary, in the village. That wasn’t new information, but Ailes cross-referenced that information with deeds and calculated the distance from known landmarks. Using a GPS app, he overlaid his geographic markers onto contemporary satellite images and was able to estimate the location of Truth’s residence—now underneath a corporate warehouse.

By 1860, Truth was living in Battle Creek, Michigan, in a household that included two daughters. Her oldest grandson, James Caldwell, enlisted in the Civil War, joining the historic 54th Massachusetts Regiment. Truth helped recruit Black soldiers, and in 1864, she moved to Washington, D.C., where she met President Lincoln and worked to improve the lives of newly freed African Americans. She served with the National Freedman’s Relief Association and later at the Freedmen’s Hospital, among the first institutions dedicated to the care of formerly enslaved people.

Decades before Homer Plessy challenged a segregated rail car in Louisiana and almost a century before Rosa Parks sat down on an Alabama bus, Truth was chasing buses and equal rights in Washington. Though a federal mandate required the streetcars to desegregate in the nation’s capital in 1865, drivers often refused to stop for Black passengers. In the 1881 edition of Truth’s life story, Olive Gilbert described a time when Truth tried to flag down a streetcar, only to be ignored. “She then gave three tremendous yelps,” the story goes on. “‘I want to ride! I want to ride!! I want to ride!!!’” Sojourner Truth seized the moment and jumped aboard. The angry conductor threatened to eject her. She invoked her Northern origins and political acumen in reply. She was “from the Empire State of New York and knew the laws as well as he did.”

After the Civil War, Truth proposed that the U.S. government give land to its four million newly minted free American citizens. Exodusters—freedpeople who sought homesteads in the prairies—were looking west for land. The federal government owed something to them, perhaps something like the Native American reservations, she said. It was an imperfect proposal—after all, reservations were squeezing Indigenous Americans into under-resourced, segregated territories after profound dispossession—but that suggestion made Sojourner Truth a foremother of the movement for slavery reparations. She advocated in petitions and in song. She often performed “I Am Pleading for My People,” believed to be her original lyrics set to the tune of “Auld Lang Syne”: “I’m pleading for my people/A poor, downtrodden race/Who dwell in freedom’s boasted land/With no abiding place.”

When she traveled to Kansas in a wagon to scope out territory for a possible homeland, a Nebraska newspaper quoted her as she described her mission. “Beneath a burning Southern sun, have we toiled, in the canebrake, the cotton field and the rice swamp. … Our nerves are sinews, our tears and blood have been sacrificed on the altar of this nation’s avarice. Our unpaid labor has been a stepping stone to its financial success. Some of its dividends must surely be ours.”

Truth knew former slaves had no retirement plans and that the aged and infirm were particularly vulnerable to neglect. She likely wondered if she might suffer a similar fate. She relied on book sales, the kindness of friends who sheltered her as she traveled, and the collection plate when she preached. It made for a tenterhooks existence. As Painter told me, “Famous male speakers like Frederick Douglass would have received fatter purses.”

Corinne Field , author of The Struggle for Equal Adulthood: Gender, Race, Age and the Fight for Citizenship in Antebellum America , is working on a new book about old age, gender and race, which will prominently feature Sojourner Truth. She says Truth was keenly interested in “old age justice,” particularly for the enslaved and freedpeople who’d been shackled into forced caregiving. She herself had ministered to other people in both slave and free households, cooking meals, changing linens and nursing the sick. As Field says, “Starting very early in life, she’s thinking about Black women household workers as care providers, and then looking at the ways in which white families target those women for disposability and neglect.”

Field is particularly moved by the way Truth’s memoir described her aging parents and the dire prospects of slaves past their prime. Her mother, Mau-Mau Bett, was scheduled to be sold at the auction block, but the heirs of her enslaver realized that once she was gone, there would be no one to take care of her ailing husband, James Baumfree. They freed her mother on the condition that she take care of him. By then, “his limbs were painfully rheumatic and distorted—more from exposure and hardship than from old age. … He was no longer considered of value, but must soon be a burthen and care to someone.” Her parents found ways to support themselves while living in a dank cellar.

When Mau-Mau Bett expired before James Baumfree, he deteriorated. His owners shuttled him between extended family and eventually freed two other elderly slaves to take care of him. After they too perished, Truth recalled, her father “was suffering dreadfully with the filth and vermin that had collected upon him.” Another older manumitted slave checked in on him but “fearing she might herself get sick … she felt obliged to leave him in his wretchedness and filth.” He was found frozen and stiff with death.

Just as Truth advocated for women and Black people, she advocated for the elderly by showing her age or even embellishing it. Field has noted that Truth “started exaggerating how old she was in the 1850s. You can track in the different editions of her narrative, how she ages herself and in her public performances.”

A newspaper report from one of Truth’s lobbying trips to Washington, D.C. shows the power she wielded as an old woman: “It was our good fortune to be in the marble room of the Senate chamber, a few days ago, when that old landmark of the past—the representative of the forever-gone age, Sojourner Truth—made her appearance. It was an hour not soon to be forgotten; for it is not often, even in this magnanimous age of progress, that we see reverend senators—even him that holds the second chair in the gift of the Republic—vacate their seats in the hall of State, to extend the hand of welcome, the meed of praise, and substantial blessings, to a poor negro woman, whose poor old form, bending under the burden of nearly four-score and ten years, tells but too plainly that her marvelously strange life is drawing to a close.”

By the 1870s, Sojourner was marketing herself as the oldest public speaker in the world. “By the time she dies,” Field said, “she’s claiming she’s over a hundred years old.” Truth was likely trolling her interviewers, who kept asking her age, while capitalizing off the appetite some white Americans had for antebellum stories. (What they usually craved were romantic stories of the Old South, not exactly what Truth had to offer.)

Truth presented strength and fragility at the same time. Advertisements for her talks sometimes drew supporters by emphasizing that she was old and rendered disabled by slavery. An injury to her right hand—which she often concealed in those photographic cards she sold—was her master’s excuse for extending her enslavement, demanding that she make up her lost work when she should have been freed. Truth could marshal sympathy and wonder at her advanced age, even as she showed remarkable energy. Pundits told improbable stories about her resilience. When she finally died in 1883, likely in her mid-80s or early 90s, the Osage City Free Press in Kansas listed her age as 108.

As early as 1939, the Detroit Tribune reported that residents of Battle Creek were trying to raise money for a monument to Sojourner Truth. In 2009, a bust of her was unveiled in the U.S. Capitol’s Emancipation Hall. Today, memorials to her stand throughout the United States, from the campus at the University of California, San Diego, to Florence, Massachusetts, where the city recently installed a historical marker honoring her suffragist activism. New York’s Sojourner Truth State Park , a 500-acre campus that includes vistas of the Hudson River Valley near where she was born, opened in 2022 and continues to develop.

A statue at the State University of New York at New Paltz is currently in limbo. Hudson Valley artist Trina Greene created the sculpture, which shows Truth at the moment she left slavery on foot, carrying her child Sophia and a few belongings. The statue’s installation has been delayed indefinitely to gather community feedback after the university’s Black studies department protested that its members had no input. Barbara Allen, Truth’s descendant, recently visited the campus and had a private viewing. “When I saw that statue, it really did something to me,” Allen said. The infant Sophia, cradled in the bronze arms of her mother, was her direct ancestor. “Without Sophia, there would be no me.”

This May, the  Sojourner Truth Legacy Plaza , a 10,000-square-foot park with a six-foot statue of Truth, will open just steps from the former site of the Akron church. That house of worship is long gone, but a nearby building, constructed on the site of the old church, was named in honor of Sojourner Truth in 1991. The community service nonprofit that now occupies that building, the United Way of Summit & Medina, donated its parking lot and several loading docks to make up the plaza and is now the channel for donations for the $2.4 million plaza construction project.

The Akron plaza has been about two decades in the making. The idea came from Faye Hersh Dambrot, a local scholar who created the first women’s studies program at the University of Akron. She asked artist Woodrow Nash if he’d create a sculpture honoring this icon of abolitionism and early feminism. Nash took the job. He carved his vision in miniature, about 18 inches tall. But funding for the full statue didn’t materialize for years. Ilene Shapiro, executive of Summit County (which includes Akron and neighboring communities), recalled that at the time, the project would have cost $250,000. “Well, trying to get that kind of money back then was next to impossible,” she said. “And so the project just sat, and then Faye passed away.”

A committee of women and men, along with local groups, kept her vision afloat. In 2019, they revived the statue proposal for the 2020 centennial of the 19th Amendment, which gave women the vote. The group secured the assistance of the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund, along with Akron stakeholders and national experts in public history.

Towanda Mullins is the chair of the Sojourner Truth Project , and has overseen a community process including the Akron alumnae chapter of her sorority, Delta Sigma Theta; the local branch of the League of Women Voters; and other organizations. She’s spent the last few years going to biweekly meetings. She is especially proud of a 2019 re-creation of a suffrage march in which Black women participated, even though leading white feminists of the time didn’t promote voting rights for Black men or women. In some ways, the Akron committee she leads has been the fulfillment of that dream deferred.

Lawana Holland-Moore, the Action Fund’s director for fellowships and interpretive strategies, believes the plaza can be a model of collaborative, community-based public history work. “In so many cases, when creating a commemorative site, it’s a matter of ‘Oh, let’s put up a statue’ and that’s it, we’re all done. This has been so much more than that. Going forward, when we’re talking about place, we’re not just talking about that one site. That site is not in a vacuum. This is part of somewhere, it’s part of the community.”

By the time the sculpture got the green light, Nash was in his mid-70s. He had a stroke midway through the sculpting process, which affected the left side of his body. After that, he carried on working slowly and shakily. “The process is a lot more difficult. It’s like I’m creating this work with one hand tied behind my back,” he said. His work shows Truth looking much as she does in photographs: long robe and shawl, bespectacled and strong. Cast in bronze, the statue depicts her holding a Bible.

Meanwhile, the plaza is taking shape and is scheduled to open in May. The word TRUTH adorns a stone wall, and pillars showcase a sketch of the old church and quotes from Truth. (The phrase “Ar’n’t I a woman?” won’t make an appearance.) Another pillar will list the names of Black women leaders in Akron’s history. Every student in the Summit County school system will visit the site.

Fifty-year-old Cory McLiechey of Grand Rapids, Michigan, plans to attend the plaza’s opening. He’s a fifth-generation grandson who founded a nonprofit called Descendants of the Truth. He also wrote a 2021 children’s book, Keeping the Truth Alive . Though Allen and McLiechey published books within months of each other—and both are descended through Truth’s daughter Sophia—they didn’t know each other before their respective works came out.

McLiechey learned about Sojourner Truth from his now-deceased older cousin, Thomas, who hung images of her on trees during family reunions. Since then, McLiechey has lent a hand to the forthcoming documentary Truth , about his ancestor. For that movie, which will soon be submitted to film festivals, he hit the road with producer Lateef Calloway. At 9 years old, Calloway first learned of Truth’s legacy from his mother, who considered Truth her personal hero and named an all-women world music band after her. “We went to New York in the height of Covid,” says McLiechey, “and we walked in the footsteps of Sojourner Truth when she went to the courthouse to choose the lawyer to get her son back out of slavery. We went to the home where she first was able to sleep in a bed, and it was pretty epic.”

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Cynthia Greenlee | READ MORE

Cynthia Greenlee is a journalist and historian who specializes in U.S. Southern and African-American history in the post-Reconstruction period of the 19th century. She holds a doctorate in history from Duke University and is a senior editor for Rewire .

Maddie McGarvey | READ MORE

Ohio-based Maddie McGarvey has received photography honors from Getty, Magnum and  Time magazine.

Home / A Nation Divided, 1832-1877 / Antebellum / Life Story: Sojourner Truth

Life Story: Sojourner Truth (ca. 1797-1883)

Fierce warrior for social justice.

The story of an enslaved woman who became one of the most important social justice activists in American history.

I Sell the Shadow to Support the Substance

I Sell the Shadow to Support the Substance (Carte de Visite), 1864. New-York Historical Society Library.

This video was created by the New-York Historical Society Teen Leaders in collaboration with the Untold project .

Sojourner Truth was born into slavery around the year 1797. Her parents, John and Elizabeth Bomfree, were enslaved by a man named Charles Hardenbergh who lived in Esopus, New York. John and Elizabeth named their new daughter Isabella.

Esopus was a predominately Dutch area, so Isabella grew up speaking Dutch. She never learned to read or write. When Isabella was five years old, she started to work for her enslaver alongside her mother, learning all of the domestic skills that would make her a valuable enslaved woman when she was grown. Isabella was one of ten or twelve children. Many of her siblings were sold away from the family when she was young, a trauma that stayed with her for the rest of her life.

When Isabella was nine, Charles Hardenbergh died. Isabella was separated from her parents and sold to a farmer named John Neely. The Neely family was very cruel to Isabella. They beat her frequently and mocked and punished her for not understanding English. When Isabella’s father visited her new home, he was horrified to see her injuries. He made arrangements for Isabella to be bought by an innkeeper. But the innkeeper had money trouble and sold Isabella again a few months later. Within a year of being separated from her parents, Isabella had three different enslavers.

Isabella’s new enslaver was John Dumont. John was a prosperous farmer who made Isabella work in his home and fields. Isabella grew up tall and strong, and John bragged to his neighbors that she worked harder than any of his male workers, enslaved or free. Within a few years of her arrival, when Isabella was still a teenager, John initiated a sexual relationship with her. Isabella, who was young and powerless, bore him at least one child. Isabella then married an older enslaved man. Ultimately, she gave birth to five children, four of whom lived to adulthood. She later recalled that she could never properly feed her babies because she was expected to breastfeed John’s white children.

During Isabella’s early life, New York passed a series of gradual emancipation laws that would ultimately abolish the practice of slavery in the state. According to these laws, Isabella was supposed to gain her freedom on July 4, 1827. John promised her that he would set her free one year earlier, but failed to keep his promise. Angry with John and tired of living with enslavement, Isabella took her youngest daughter and left John’s farm in 1826, claiming her own freedom.

Isabella found shelter and safety nearby with the Dutch Van Wagenens, a family she had known as a child. The Van Wagenens were abolitionists, and they helped her buy her freedom from John. To mark her new status as a free woman, she changed her name to Isabella Van Wagenen.

Shortly after Isabella left, John sold her son Peter. New York law required that Peter be kept in the state until he earned his own freedom under the emancipation laws, but Peter’s new owners took him to Alabama, where he could be enslaved for life. This kidnapping reminded Isabella of the trauma of losing her siblings. She sprang into action, demanding that local law enforcement get her son back. She gave public speeches in Kingston, New York, explaining the cruelties of slavery to any white person who would listen. She finally succeeded in regaining custody of her son, but Peter never recovered from the cruelty and terror he experienced while enslaved in the Deep South.

While she was fighting for custody of Peter, Isabella experienced a spiritual awakening. Her mother taught her spiritual traditions from Africa when she was a child, and she’d been exposed to Dutch Reform and Methodist teachings, but she had not committed fully to religion. In 1827, while she was considering returning to John’s farm, Isabella claimed God reprimanded her for not living a better life. She dedicated herself to doing God’s work in the future.

In 1851, Sojourner gave the famous speech commonly titled “Ain’t I a Woman” at the Ohio Women’s Rights Convention. The text of the speech was later changed by a white publisher to make Sojourner sound more Southern, changing the public’s image of her.

In 1828, Isabella moved to New York City. She joined the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, which allowed her to meet and speak with many Black community leaders. She continued to explore her new religious calling and learned more about the abolitionist movement. She also found new causes to champion, including temperance, women’s rights, Black uplift, and pacifism. She took up teaching and preaching in New York’s poorest neighborhoods, boldly going places other women activists feared to visit.

For the next 11 years, Isabella worked as domestic servant before undergoing a second spiritual transformation. She believed God was calling her to travel and preach about the causes she believed in. To mark the start of this new chapter in her life, Isabella changed her name to Sojourner Truth. She was about 45 years old.

Sojourner traveled throughout the Northeast, telling her story and working to convince people to end slavery and support women’s rights. She had little money, so she often walked from place to place and sometimes slept outdoors. She met abolitionist leaders like Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, and David Ruggles along the way. She never shied away from challenging these celebrities in public when she disagreed with them. Sojourner’s lack of education and her Dutch accent made her something of an outsider, but the power of words and her conviction impressed all those around her.

Sojourner dictated her autobiography to a friend in 1850. Then she traveled west to continue her teaching. In 1851, she gave the famous speech commonly titled “Ain’t I a Woman” at the Ohio Women’s Rights Convention. The text of the speech was later changed by a white publisher to make Sojourner sound more Southern, changing the public’s image of her. That version of the speech is still the most widely known today.

Sojourner encountered fierce opposition from pro-slavery groups wherever she traveled. She was often attacked, and on one occasion, she was beaten so severely that she was left with a limp for the rest of her life. However, Sojourner never stopped travelling and teaching, sure that God would protect her.

When the Civil War began, Sojourner dedicated her considerable talents to recruiting soldiers for the Union Army. Although she was a pacifist, she believed that the war was a fair punishment from God for the crime of slavery. She also knew the Union needed fighters to win. In 1864, she moved to Washington, D.C., and worked for the National Freedman’s Relief Association, striving to improve the lives and prospects of free Black people. That fall, she was invited to meet President Abraham Lincoln. But even in the midst of a war, she found time to ride the capital’s streetcars to force their desegregation.

After the war, Sojourner lobbied the U.S. government to grant land to newly free Black men and women. She understood that Black people could never be truly free until they achieved economic prosperity, and she knew that owning land was an important first step. She also continued to travel throughout the United States, giving speeches about women’s rights, prison reform, and desegregation. She was a passionate champion of all aspects of social justice right up until her death on November 26, 1883.

• abolition: The movement to end slavery in the United States.
• African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church: A historically Black Christian church founded in New York City in 1821.
• Black uplift: The idea that educated Black people are responsible for helping to improve the conditions of all Black people.
• commune: A group of people who live together and share possessions and responsibilities.
• desegregation: Ending the policy of keeping different races separate.
• dictate: Speak aloud so someone else can record that person’s words.
• domestic: Chores related to running a home.
• emancipation: Setting people free from slavery.
• lobbied: Conduct activities to influence government officials.
• National Freedman’s Relief Association: An organization dedicated to helping Black people after the Civil War.
• pacifism: The belief that any violence is unjustifiable.
• temperance: The movement to outlaw liquor in the United States.
• women’s rights: The cause of promoting women’s equality to men.

Discussion Questions

• How did Sojourner Truth’s childhood experiences affect her adult life?
• What does Sojourner Truth’s story reveal about slavery and emancipation in the Northern states?
• Sojourner Truth changed her name twice in her lifetime. What events prompted these changes? What do these changes tell us about the power of names?
• Why did Sojourner Truth speak out about so many different issues?

Suggested Activities

• APUSH Connection: 4.11 An Age of Reform
• Include this life story in any lesson about prominent leaders of the abolitionist movement.
• Sojourner Truth, the Grimké Sisters , and Harriet Jacobs were all part of the same abolitionist circle. Read and compare their life stories to achieve a more holistic understanding of the community and the way women operated within it.
• Sojourner Truth was one of many Black women activists operating in the antebellum period. After reading her story, invite students to learn more about the experience of other Black women activists in this period, and compare and contrast the challenges and experiences of each: Elizabeth Jennings , Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl , Salem Female Anti-Slavery Society , Resistance , Harriet Robinson Scott , and Harriet Tubman .
• Sojourner Truth was able to establish herself as a successful free Black woman despite many struggles. For more examples of free Black women succeeding against difficult odds in the antebellum period, see: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl , Salem Female Anti-Slavery Society , Freedom Bonds , Fighting Segregation , Life Story: Letitia Carson , and Life Story: Elizabeth Keckley .
• To learn about the activism of Black women after the Civil War, explore any of the following: “ All Bound Up Together ,” Claiming Political Power , Laundry Worker’s Strike , Life Story: Elizabeth Keckley , and Life Story: Susie Baker King Taylor .
• The fight for social justice issues continues today. Ask your students to pick one of the causes Sojourner Truth championed and research a modern-day activist who has continued the fight. How has the movement evolved since Sojourner Truth?

ACTIVISM AND SOCIAL CHANGE

New-York Historical Society Curriculum Library Connections

• For more about the history of slavery and emancipation in New York, see  New York Divided .

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Biography of Sojourner Truth, Abolitionist and Lecturer

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Sojourner Truth (born Isabella Baumfree; c. 1797–November 26, 1883) was a famous Black American abolitionist and women's rights activist. Emancipated from enslavement by New York state law in 1827, she served as an itinerant preacher before becoming involved in the anti-slavery and women's rights movements. In 1864, Truth met Abraham Lincoln in his White House office.

Fast Facts: Sojourner Truth

• Known For : Truth was an abolitionist and women's rights activist known for her fiery speeches.
• Also Known As : Isabella Baumfree
• Born : c. 1797 in Swartekill, New York
• Parents : James and Elizabeth Baumfree
• Died : November 26, 1883 in Battle Creek, Michigan
• Published Works : "The Narrative of Sojourner Truth: A Northern Slave" (1850)
• Notable Quote : "This is what all suffragists must understand, whatever their sex or color—that all the disfranchised of the earth have a common cause."

The woman known as Sojourner Truth was enslaved from birth. She was born in New York as Isabella Baumfree (after her father's enslaver, Baumfree) in 1797. Her parents were James and Elizabeth Baumfree. She had many enslavers, and while enslaved by the John Dumont family in Ulster County, she married Thomas, also enslaved by Dumont and many years older than Isabella. The couple had five children together. In 1827, New York law emancipated all enslaved people. At this point, however, Isabella had already left her husband and taken her youngest child, going to work for the family of Isaac Van Wagenen.

While working for the Van Wagenens—whose name she used briefly—Isabella discovered that a member of the Dumont family sent one of her children into enslavement in Alabama. Since this son had been emancipated under New York Law, Isabella sued in court and won his return.

In New York City, Isabella worked as a servant and attended a White Methodist church and an African Methodist Episcopal Church, where she reunited briefly with three of her older siblings.

Isabella came under the influence of a religious prophet named Matthias in 1832. She then moved to a Methodist perfectionist commune, led by Matthias, where she was the only Black member, and few members were of the working class. The commune fell apart a few years later, with allegations of sexual improprieties and even murder. Isabella herself was accused of poisoning another member, and she sued successfully for libel in 1835. She continued her work as a household servant until 1843.

William Miller, a millenarian prophet, predicted that Christ would return in 1843 amid economic turmoil during and after the panic of 1837.

On June 1, 1843, Isabella took the name Sojourner Truth, believing this to be on the instructions of the Holy Spirit. She became a traveling preacher (the meaning of her new name, Sojourner), making a tour of Millerite camps. When the Great Disappointment became clear—the world did not end as predicted—she joined a utopian community, the Northampton Association, founded in 1842 by people interested in abolitionism and women's rights.

Abolitionism

After joining the abolitionist movement, Truth became a popular circuit speaker. She made her first anti-slavery speech in 1845 in New York City. The commune failed in 1846, and she bought a house on Park Street in New York. She dictated her autobiography to women's rights activist Olive Gilbert and published it in Boston in 1850. Truth used the income from the book, "The Narrative of Sojourner Truth," to pay off her mortgage.

In 1850, she also began speaking about women's suffrage . Her most famous speech, "Ain't I a Woman?," was given in 1851 at a women's rights convention in Ohio. The speech—which addressed the ways in which Truth was oppressed for being both Black and a woman—remains influential today.

Truth eventually met Harriet Beecher Stowe , who wrote about her for the Atlantic Monthly and wrote a new introduction to Truth's autobiography.

Later, Truth moved to Michigan and joined yet another religious commune, this one associated with the Friends. She was at one point friendly with Millerites, a religious movement that grew out of Methodism and later became the Seventh Day Adventists.

During the Civil War, Truth raised food and clothing contributions for Black regiments, and she met Abraham Lincoln at the White House in 1864 (the meeting was arranged by Lucy N. Colman and Elizabeth Keckley ). During her White House visit, she tried to challenge the discriminatory policy of segregating street cars by race. Truth was also an active member of the National Freedman's Relief Association.

After the war ended, Truth again traveled and gave lectures, advocating for some time for a "Negro State" in the west. She spoke mainly to White audiences and mostly on religion, the rights of Black Americans and women, and temperance , though immediately after the Civil War she tried to organize efforts to provide jobs for Black refugees from the war.

Truth remained active in politics until 1875, when her grandson and companion fell ill and died. She then returned to Michigan, where her health deteriorated. She died in 1883 in a Battle Creek sanitorium of infected ulcers on her legs. Truth was buried in Battle Creek, Michigan, after a well-attended funeral.

Truth was a major figure in the abolitionist movement, and she has been widely celebrated for her work. In 1981, she was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame, and in 1986 the U.S. Postal Service issued a stamp in her honor. In 2009, a bust of Truth was placed in the U.S. Capitol. Her autobiography is read in classrooms throughout the country.

• Bernard, Jacqueline. "Journey Toward Freedom: The Story of Sojourney Truth." Price Stern Sloan, 1967.
• Saunders Redding, "Sojourner Truth" in "Notable American Women 1607-1950 Volume III P-Z." Edward T. James, editor. Janet Wilson James and Paul S. Boyer, assistant editors. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press, 1971.
• Stetson, Erlene, and Linda David. "Glorying in Tribulation: The Lifework of Sojourner Truth." Michigan State University Press, 1994.
• Truth, Sojourner. "The Narrative of Sojourner Truth: a Northern Slave." Dover Publications Inc., 1997.
• Biography of Maria W. Stewart, Groundbreaking Lecturer and Activist
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Kabardino-Balkaria

• Part of a series on the Circassians Адыгэхэр Circassia

Kabardino-Balkaria ( Russian : Кабарди́но-Балка́рия ), officially the Kabardino-Balkarian Republic , [note 1] [10] [11] [12] is a republic of Russia located in the North Caucasus . As of the 2021 Census , its population was   904,200. [13] Its capital is Nalchik . The area contains the highest mountain in Europe, Mount Elbrus , at 5,642   m (18,510   ft) . Mount Elbrus has 22 glaciers that feed three rivers — Baksan , Malka and Kuban . The mountain is covered with snow year-round.

Natural resources

Administrative divisions, demographics, vital statistics, ethnic groups, external links.

The republic is situated in the North Caucasus mountains, with plains in the northern part. The republic shares an international border with Georgia .

• Area : 12,500 square kilometers (4,800   sq   mi)
• internal : Stavropol Krai (N/NE), North Ossetia–Alania (E/SE/S), Karachay–Cherkessia (W/NW)
• international : Georgia ( Racha-Lechkhumi and Kvemo Svaneti , Zemo Svaneti ) (S/SW)
• Highest point : Mount Elbrus (5,642   m)
• Maximum N->S distance : 167 kilometers (104   mi)
• Maximum E->W distance : 123 kilometers (76   mi)

Kabardino-Balkaria is traversed by the northeasterly line of equal latitude and longitude.

Major rivers include:

• Terek River (623   km)
• Malka River (216   km)
• Baksan River (173   km)
• Urukh River (104   km)
• Chegem River (102   km)
• Cherek River (76   km)
• Argudan River
• Kurkuzhin River
• Lesken River

There are about 100 lakes in the Republic, none of which is large. Just over half (55) are located between the Baksan and Malka Rivers, the largest each of an area of no more than 0.01 square kilometers (0.0039   sq   mi) . Some of the lakes are:

• Tserikkel Lake (area 26,000   m 2 ; depth 368   m)
• Lower Goluboye Lake
• Kel-Ketchen Lake (depth 177   m)
• Upper Tserikkel Lake (depth 18   m)
• Sekretnoye Lake
• Tambukan Lake (area 1.77   km 2 ; depth 1.5 to 2   m), partially within Stavropol Krai.
• Mount Elbrus (5,642   m), a volcanic mountain and the highest peak in Europe , Russia , and the Caucasus

Other major mountains include:

• Mount Dykhtau (5,402   m)
• Mount Koshtantau (5,151   m)
• Mount Shkhara (5,068   m)
• Pushkin Peak (5,033   m)
• Mount Mizhergi (5,025   m)

Kabardino-Balkaria's natural resources include molybdenum , tungsten , and coal .

The republic has a continental-type climate.

• Average January temperature : −12   °C (10   °F) (mountains) to −4   °C (25   °F) (plains)
• Average July temperature : +4   °C (39   °F) (mountains) to +23   °C (73   °F) (plains)
• Average annual precipitation : 500–2,000   mm.

It is known that modern-day Circassians also called Kassogs were inhabiting Kabardino Balkaria since at least the 6th century BCE, then known as Zichia. [14] On 1 July 1994 Kabardino-Balkaria became the second republic after Tatarstan to sign a power-sharing agreement with the federal government, granting it autonomy. [15]

The head of government in Kabardino-Balkaria is the Head . The current Head is Kazbek Kokov . [16] The legislative body of the Republic is the Parliament comprising 72 deputies elected for a five-year term. [3] [17]

The republic adopted a new constitution in 2001 which prevents the republic from existing independently of the Russian Federation. [18]

• Nalchik (Нальчик) (capital)
• Baksan (Баксан)
• Prokhladny (Прохладный)
• Baksansky (Баксанский)
• Chegem (Чегем)
• Chereksky (Черекский)
• Tyrnyauz (Тырныауз)
• Leskensky (Лескенский)
• Maysky (Майский)
• Prokhladnensky (Прохладненский)
• Terek (Терек)
• Nartkala (Нарткала)
• Zolsky (Зольский)

Population : 904,200   ( 2021 Census ) ; [13] 859,939   ( 2010 Census ) ; [19] 901,494   ( 2002 Census ) ; [20] 759,586   ( 1989 Soviet census ) . [21]

Life expectancy : [22] [23]

Note: TFR 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012 source. [26]

Kabardino-Balkaria includes two major ethnic communities, the Kabardins (Circassians), who speak a North-West Caucasian language , and the Balkars who speak a Turkic language . According to the 2021 Census , [27] Kabardins make up 57.1% of the republic's population, followed by Russians (19.8%) and Balkars (13.7%). Other groups include Cherkess (3.0%), Turks (1.9%), Ossetians (0.8%), Romani (0.5%), and a host of smaller groups, each accounting for less than 0.5% of the total population.

According to a 2012 survey which interviewed 56,900 people, [30] 70.8% of the population of Kabardino-Balkaria adhered to Islam , 11.6% to the Russian Orthodox Church , 3.8% were non-Orthodox Christians , and 1.8% followed Adyghe (Kabardian) folk religion and other indigenous faiths. In addition, 12% of the population declared to be " spiritual but not religious " and 5.6% was atheist or followed other religions, including Jehovah's Witnesses . [30]

• Caucasian Avars
• List of the Chairmen of the Parliament of the Kabardino-Balkarian Republic
• Minor hydro-electric plants of Kabardino-Balkaria
• Mount Imeon
• ↑ Russian : Кабарди́но-Балка́рская Респу́блика , romanized :   Kabardino-Balkarskaya Respublika ; Kabardian : Къэбэрдей-Балъкъэр Республикэ , romanized:   Ķêbêrdej-Baĺķêr Respublikê ; Karachay-Balkar : Къабарты-Малкъар Республика , romanized:   Qabartı-Malqar Respublika

Related Research Articles

Nalchik is the capital city of Kabardino-Balkaria, Russia, situated at an altitude of 550 meters (1,800 ft) in the foothills of the Caucasus Mountains; about 100 kilometers (62 mi) northwest of Beslan. It covers an area of 131 square kilometers (51 sq mi). Population: 247,054 (2021 Census) ; 240,203 (2010 Census) ; 274,974 (2002 Census) ; 234,547 (1989 Soviet census) .

Tyrnyauz is a town and the administrative center of Elbrussky District of the Kabardino-Balkarian Republic, Russia, located on the main road leading to the Upper Baksan valley area and on the main climbing route for Mount Elbrus. Population: 21,000 (2010 Census) . Tyrnyauz is the largest town in the Baksan Valley and an essential provisioning point for trips into the Elbrus region.

Prokhladny is a town in the Kabardino-Balkarian Republic, Russia, located on the Malka River, 60 kilometers (37 mi) north of Nalchik. Population: 59,601 (2010 Census) ; 61,772 (2002 Census) ; 57,084 (1989 Soviet census) .

Terek is a town and the administrative center of Tersky District of the Kabardino-Balkarian Republic, Russia, located on the right bank of the Terek River, 59 kilometers (37 mi) east of Nalchik. Population: 19,170 (2010 Census) .

Baksansky District is an administrative and a municipal district (raion), one of the ten in the Kabardino-Balkarian Republic, Russia. It is located in the north of the republic. The area of the district is 829.58 square kilometers (320.30 sq mi). Its administrative center is the town of Baksan. As of the 2010 Census, the total population of the district was 60,970.

Chegemsky District is an administrative and a municipal district (raion), one of the ten in the Kabardino-Balkar Republic, Russia. It is located in the central and southwestern parts of the republic. The area of the district is 1,503.32 square kilometers (580.44 sq mi). Its administrative center is the town of Chegem. As of the 2010 Census, the total population of the district was 69,092, with the population of Chegem accounting for 26.1% of that number.

Chereksky District is an administrative and a municipal district (raion), one of the ten in the Kabardino-Balkar Republic, Russia. It is located in the central and southern parts of the republic. The area of the district is 2,210 square kilometers (850 sq mi). Its administrative center is the rural locality of Kashkhatau. As of the 2010 Census, the total population of the district was 26,956, with the population of Kashkhatau accounting for 19.6% of that number.

Elbrussky District is an administrative and a municipal district (raion), one of the ten in the Kabardino-Balkar Republic, Russia. It is located in the western and southwestern parts of the republic. The area of the district is 1,850.43 square kilometers (714.46 sq mi). Its administrative center is the town of Tyrnyauz. As of the 2010 Census, the total population of the district was 36,260, with the population of Tyrnyauz accounting for 57.9% of that number.

Leskensky District is an administrative and a municipal district (raion), one of the ten in the Kabardino-Balkar Republic, Russia. It is located in the southeast of the republic. The area of the district is 523.06 square kilometers (201.95 sq mi). Its administrative center is the rural locality of Anzorey. As of the 2010 Census, the total population of the district was 27,840, with the population of Anzorey accounting for 23.5% of that number.

Maysky District is an administrative and a municipal district (raion), one of the ten in the Kabardino-Balkarian Republic, Russia. It is located in the east of the republic. The area of the district is 384.76 square kilometers (148.56 sq mi). Its administrative center is the town of Maysky. As of the 2010 Census, the total population of the district was 38,625, with the population of the administrative center accounting for 69.3% of that number.

Prokhladnensky District is an administrative and a municipal district (raion), one of the ten in the Kabardino-Balkar Republic, Russia. It is located in the northeast of the republic. The area of the district is 1,342 square kilometers (518 sq mi). Its administrative center is the town of Prokhladny. As of the 2010 Census, the total population of the district was 45,533.

Tersky District is an administrative and a municipal district (raion), one of the ten in the Kabardino-Balkarian Republic, Russia. It is located in the east of the republic. The area of the district is 893.12 square kilometers (344.84 sq mi). Its administrative center is the town of Terek. As of the 2010 Census, the total population of the district was 51,220, with the population of Terek accounting for 37.4% of that number.

Urvansky District is an administrative and a municipal district (raion), one of the ten in the Kabardino-Balkarian Republic, Russia. It is located in the east of the republic. The area of the district is 458 square kilometers (177 sq mi). Its administrative center is the town of Nartkala. As of the 2010 Census, the total population of the district was 71,782, with the population of Nartkala accounting for 44.2% of that number.

Zolsky District is an administrative and a municipal district (raion), one of the ten in the Kabardino-Balkar Republic, Russia. It is located in the western and northwestern parts of the republic. The area of the district is 2,124 square kilometers (820 sq mi). Its administrative center is the rural locality of Zalukokoazhe. As of the 2010 Census, the total population of the district was 48,939, with the population of Zalukokoazhe accounting for 20.1% of that number.

Baksan is a town in the Kabardino-Balkarian Republic, Russia, located 24 kilometers (15 mi) northwest of Nalchik on the left bank of the Baksan River. Population: 60,445 (2021 Census) ; 36,860 (2010 Census) ; 35,805 (2002 Census) ; 28,767 (1989 Soviet census) .

Chegem is a town and the administrative center of Chegemsky District of the Kabardino-Balkarian Republic, Russia, located 10 kilometers (6.2 mi) north of Nalchik, at the elevation of about 470 meters (1,540 ft). Population: 18,019 (2010 Census) .

Maysky is a town and the administrative center of Maysky District of the Kabardino-Balkarian Republic, Russia, located 40 kilometers (25 mi) northeast of Nalchik, the capital of the republic. Population: 26,755 (2010 Census) .

Nartkala is a town and the administrative center of Urvansky District of the Kabardino-Balkarian Republic, Russia, located 25 kilometers (16 mi) northeast of Nalchik. Population: 31,694 (2010 Census) .

Kashkhatau is a rural locality and the administrative center of Chereksky District of the Kabardino-Balkar Republic, Russia. Population: 5,295 (2010 Census) ; 5,211 (2002 Census) ; 4,412 (1989 Soviet census) .

Zalukokoazhe is a rural locality and the administrative center of Zolsky District of the Kabardino-Balkar Republic, Russia. Population: 9,859 (2010 Census) ; 9,276 (2002 Census) ; 6,110 (1989 Soviet census) .

• ↑ Law #13-RZ
• ↑ Constitution of the Kabardino-Balkarian Republic, Article   136
• 1 2 Constitution of the Kabardino-Balkarian Republic, Article   91
• ↑ Constitution of the Kabardino-Balkarian Republic, Article   78
• ↑ Official website of the Head of the Kabardino-Balkarian Republic. Biography Archived October 28, 2014, at the Wayback Machine (in Russian)
• ↑ "Об исчислении времени". Официальный интернет-портал правовой информации (in Russian). Archived from the original on June 22, 2020 . Retrieved January 19, 2019 .
• 1 2 Constitution of the Kabardino-Balkarian Republic, Article   76
• ↑ Official throughout the Russian Federation according to Article   68.1 of the Constitution of Russia .
• ↑ "Head of Kabardino-Balkarian Republic reported to the President on the situation in Mount Elbrus region" . President of Russia . September 2, 2017 . Retrieved February 17, 2020 .
• ↑ "Russia's federal constituent entities" . Federation Council of the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation . Retrieved February 17, 2020 .
• ↑ Skutsch, Carl (November 7, 2013). Encyclopedia of the World's Minorities . Routledge. ISBN   978-1-135-19388-1 .
• 1 2 Russian Federal State Statistics Service. Всероссийская перепись населения 2020 года. Том 1 [ 2020 All-Russian Population Census, vol. 1 ] (XLS) (in Russian). Federal State Statistics Service .
• ↑ Kazhdan, A. P.; Talbot, A-M. M.; Cutler, A.; Gregory, T. E.; Ševčenko, N. P., eds. (1991). The Oxford dictionary of Byzantium . New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN   0-19-504652-8 . OCLC   22733550 .
• ↑ Solnick, Steven (May 29, 1996). "Asymmetries in Russian Federation Bargaining" (PDF) . The National Council for Soviet and East European Research : 12.
• ↑ Путин опять увольняет губернаторов, а на их место назначает однофамильцев или бывших губернаторов. А-а-а! Как не запутаться? Вот шпаргалка . Meduza (in Russian) . Retrieved September 26, 2018 .
• ↑ Constitution, Article   94.
• ↑ Bell 2003 , p.   78.
• ↑ Russian Federal State Statistics Service (2011). Всероссийская перепись населения 2010 года. Том   1 [ 2010 All-Russian Population Census, vol.   1 ] . Всероссийская перепись населения 2010   года [2010 All-Russia Population Census] (in Russian). Federal State Statistics Service .
• ↑ Federal State Statistics Service (May 21, 2004). Численность населения России, субъектов Российской Федерации в составе федеральных округов, районов, городских поселений, сельских населённых пунктов   – районных центров и сельских населённых пунктов с населением 3   тысячи и более человек [ Population of Russia, Its Federal Districts, Federal Subjects, Districts, Urban Localities, Rural Localities—Administrative Centers, and Rural Localities with Population of Over 3,000 ] (XLS) . Всероссийская перепись населения 2002   года [All-Russia Population Census of 2002] (in Russian).
• ↑ Всесоюзная перепись населения 1989   г. Численность наличного населения союзных и автономных республик, автономных областей и округов, краёв, областей, районов, городских поселений и сёл-райцентров [ All Union Population Census of 1989: Present Population of Union and Autonomous Republics, Autonomous Oblasts and Okrugs, Krais, Oblasts, Districts, Urban Settlements, and Villages Serving as District Administrative Centers ] . Всесоюзная перепись населения 1989   года [All-Union Population Census of 1989] (in Russian). Институт демографии Национального исследовательского университета: Высшая школа экономики [Institute of Demography at the National Research University: Higher School of Economics]. 1989 – via Demoscope Weekly .
• ↑ "Демографический ежегодник России" [ The Demographic Yearbook of Russia ] (in Russian). Federal State Statistics Service of Russia (Rosstat) . Retrieved June 28, 2022 .
• ↑ "Ожидаемая продолжительность жизни при рождении" [ Life expectancy at birth ] . Unified Interdepartmental Information and Statistical System of Russia (in Russian). Archived from the original on February 20, 2022 . Retrieved June 28, 2022 .
• ↑ Russian Federal State Statistics Service Archived April 12, 2008, at the Wayback Machine
• ↑ "Официальные статистические показатели" (in Russian).
• ↑ "Каталог публикаций::Федеральная служба государственной статистики" . Archived from the original on March 24, 2013.
• ↑ "Национальный состав населения" . Federal State Statistics Service . Retrieved December 30, 2022 .
• ↑ "население кабардино-балкарии" .
• ↑ "ВПН-2010" . Archived from the original on December 25, 2018 . Retrieved December 22, 2011 .
• 1 2 3 "Arena: Atlas of Religions and Nationalities in Russia" . Sreda, 2012.
• ↑ 2012 Arena Atlas Religion Maps . "Ogonek", № 34 (5243), 27/08/2012. Retrieved 21/04/2017. Archived .
• Bell, Imogen (2003). The Territories of the Russian Federation 2003 . Europa Publications. ISBN   1-85743-191-X .
• Совет Республики Парламента Кабардино-Балкарской Республики.   Закон   №13-РЗ   от   4 августа 1994 г. «О государственном гимне Кабардино-Балкарской Республики», в ред. Закона №13-РЗ от   13 апреля 2015 г   «О внесении изменений в статьи   2 и   4 Закона Кабардино-Балкарской Республики "О государственном гимне Кабардино-Балкарской Республики"». Вступил в силу   18 августа 1994 г. Опубликован: "Кабардино-Балкарская правда", №148, 12 августа 1994 г. (Council of the Republic of the Parliament of the Kabardino-Balkarian Republic.   Law   # 13-RZ   of   August   4, 1994 On the State Anthem of the Kabardino-Balkarian Republic , as amended by the Law   # 13-RZ of   April   13, 2015 On Amending Articles   2 and   4 of the Law of the Kabardino-Balkarian Republic "On the State Anthem of the Kabardino-Balkarian Republic" . Effective as of   August   18, 1994.).
• Парламент Кабардино-Балкарской Республики.   №28-РЗ   1 сентября 1997 г. «Конституция Кабардино-Балкарской Республики», в ред. Закона №40-РЗ от   19 октября 2015 г.   «О поправках к Конституции Кабардино-Балкарской Республики». Вступил в силу   со дня официального опубликования. Опубликован: "Кабардино-Балкарская правда", №177, 9 сентября 1997 г. (Parliament of the Kabardino-Balkarian Republic.   # 28-RZ   September   1, 1997 Constitution of the Kabardino-Balkarian Republic , as amended by the Law   # 40-RZ of   October   19, 2015 On the Amendments to the Constitution of the Kabardino-Balkarian Republic . Effective as of   the day of the official publication.).
• Дударев, В. А.; Евсеева, Н. А. (1987). И. Каманина (ed.). СССР. Административно-территориальное деление союзных республик (in Russian). Moscow. {{ cite book }} : CS1 maint: location missing publisher ( link )
• (in Russian) Official website of the Head of the Republic
• Pictures of the Kabardino-Balkarian Republic
• BBC News . Kabardino-Balkaria Profile