Sojourner Truth, born into slavery in Ulster County, New York, as Isabella (Belle) Baumfree. She grew up speaking only Dutch. When she 9 years old, her master died and his estate was sold. She herself was sold along with a flock of sheep for $100 to a harsh master, and later sold twice more. In 1826, she escaped with her infant daughter, regained custody of her illegally sold son in the first successful case of its kind in 1828, married, became a staunch Christian, met abolitionists, including Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison, and in 1843, adopted the name by which most people today know her on account, she said, of being called by God to travel and preach the abolition of slavery. For the next few decades she worked tirelessly in that cause, on her own, and as a member of several abolitionist groups, mostly short-lived ones.
At age 70, she gave a speech at the May 9-10, 1867, meeting of the American Equal Rights Association, an organization of men and women, blacks and whites, which had been founded the previous year by, among others, Douglass, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucy Stone, Henry Blackwell, and Lucretia Mott. Its constitution stated that it had been founded to "to secure Equal Rights to all American citizens, especially the right of suffrage, irrespective of race, color or sex."
Mott introduced her and she was greeted with loud cheers, after which she said:
My friends, I am rejoiced that you are glad, but I don't know how you will feel when I get through.
I come from another field—the country of the slave. They have got their liberty—so much good luck to have slavery partly destroyed; not entirely. I want it root and branch destroyed. Then we will all be free indeed.
I feel that if I have to answer for the deeds done in my body just as much as a man, I have a right to have just as much as a man. There is a great stir about colored men getting their rights, but not a word about the colored women; and if colored men get their rights, and not colored women theirs, you see the colored men will be masters over the women, and it will be just as bad as it was before. So I am for keeping the thing going while things are stirring; because if we wait till it is still, it will take a great while to get it going again.
White women are a great deal smarter, and know more than colored women, while colored women do not know scarcely anything. They go out washing, which is about as high as a colored woman gets, and their men go about idle, strutting up and down; and when the women come home, they ask for their money and take it all, and then scold because there is no food. I want you to consider on that, chil'n.
I call you chil'n; you are somebody's chil'n, and I am old enough to be mother of all that is here. I want women to have their rights. In the courts women have no right, no voice; nobody speaks for them. I wish woman to have her voice there among the pettifoggers. If it is not a fit place for women, it is unfit for men to be there.
I am above eighty years old; it is about time for me to be going. I have been forty years a slave and forty years free, and would be here forty years more to have equal rights for all. I suppose I am kept here because something remains for me to do; I suppose I am yet to help to break the chain.
I have done a great deal of work; as much as a man,but did not get so much pay. I used to work in the field and bind grain, keeping up with the cradler; but men doing no more, got twice as much pay; so with the German women. They work in the field and do as much work, but do not get the pay. We do as much, we eat as much, we want as much.
I suppose I am about the only colored woman that goes about to speak for the rights of the colored women. I want to keep the thing stirring, now that the ice is cracked. What we want is a little money. You men know that you get as much again as women when you write, or for what you do. When we get our rights we shall not have to come to you for money, for then we shall have money enough in our own pockets; and maybe you will ask us for money. But help us now until we get it. It is a good consolation to know thatwhen we have got this battle once fought we shall not be coming to you any more.
You have been having our rights so long, that you think, like a slave-holder, that you own us. I know that it is hard for one who has held the reins for so long to give up; it cuts like a knife. It will feel all the better when it closes up again.
I have been in Washington about three years, seeing about these colored people. Now colored men have the right to vote. There ought to be equal rights now more than ever, since colored people have got their freedom.
TOP COMMENTS • HIGH IMPACT STORIES
QUOTATION
“The slow-rising central horror of "Watergate" is not that it might grind down to the reluctant impeachment of a vengeful thug of a president whose entire political career has been a monument to the same kind of cheap shots and treachery he finally got nailed for, but that we might somehow fail to learn something from it.”
~Hunter S. Thompson Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 (1973)
TWEET OF THE DAY
BLAST FROM THE PAST
On this date at Daily Kos in 2011—O’Keefe copycat who targeted Planned Parenthood faceplants out of the gate:
So another weirdo wingnut James O'Keefe wannabe has released a hoax video targeting "the left." This one was created by an anti-choice activist named Lila Rose and it targets Planned Parenthood. Rose, who collaborated with O'Keefe in the past, aimed to produce a carbon copy of his ACORN/pimp hoax videos, this time substituting ACORN with Planned Parenthood and O'Keefe's pimp outfit with actors and actresses claiming to be part of an underage prostitution ring.
Rose is just now releasing the videos in which she claims that Planned Parenthood conspired to cover up the prostitution ring. She only leaves out one detail: Planned Parenthood officials, who instantly realized they were probably being punked, nonetheless went to federal authorities on the off-chance that Rose's actors weren't part of another O'Keefe style hoax.
On today’s Kagro in the Morning show, zOMG it's "Memo" Day! Again. We give you the mechanics behind the garbage. Follow up: that Russian gas shipment. Plus all the juicy stuff you need for the weekend. And an essay from Eric Posner that he didn’t title, “Rich Man, Porn Man,” but could have.