She was born Isabella Baumfree around 1797 in Swartekill, New York, and was sold for the first time at age nine — bundled with a flock of sheep for one hundred dollars. She was sold twice more before she was thirteen. She spoke only Dutch until she was sold to an English-speaking owner. She was beaten for not understanding commands in a language she had never heard. She escaped slavery in 1826 with her infant daughter, walking to the home of abolitionists who paid her enslaver twenty dollars for the remainder of her service. She then did something almost no one in her position had ever done: she sued a white man in court for the return of her son, who had been illegally sold to a plantation in Alabama. She won.
In 1843 she renamed herself Sojourner Truth, because she intended to walk the country telling the truth, and that is exactly what she did. She was nearly six feet tall and illiterate, and she could hold an audience in the palm of her hand. She preached abolition and women's rights at a time when those causes were considered radical separately and insane together. She did not write her speeches down. She did not need to. When someone told her that her activism was pointless and that he cared no more for her talk than for a fleabite, she replied: "Maybe not, but the Lord willing, I'll keep you scratching."
She met Abraham Lincoln at the White House. She rode the streetcars of Washington, D.C. after the war and physically resisted when conductors tried to throw her off — a century before Montgomery. She spent her last years in Battle Creek, Michigan, still speaking, still scratching. She could not read a single word of the Constitution that had failed her, and she understood it better than most of the men who wrote it.
"Perhaps the reason the Universe gave you a broken world is so that you could have a chance to fix it."