Hundreds gathered in an Ohio city on Wednesday to unveil a plaza and statue dedicated to abolitionist Sojourner Truth at the very spot where the women’s rights pioneer gave an iconic 1851 speech now known as “Ain’t I a Woman?”
As O.D. Collins sang “His Eye is On the Sparrow,” generations of Sojourner Truth descendants gathered around the headstone of a man who died 122 years ago.
Though polls are not a definitive measure of who will win an election, Warren and Klobuchar tend to poll more weakly than the men in the race – Vice President Biden, Sanders, and former Mayor Pete Buttigieg. Have we come such a long way since 2016 that a woman is electable? Can so-called progressive men who want to get 45 out of the White House overcome their gender bias to vote for a woman?
Sojourner Truth delivered a speech, “Ain’t I a Woman” at the 1st Black Woman’s Rights Convention, 1851.
The 19th Amendment was adopted Aug. 18, 1920, after the required number of states ratified the constitutional measure. Though many Black women led suffrage campaigns, the 19th Amendment put white women on an empowerment tract to electoral engagement. Interestingly, the suffrage movement, festooned in the symbolic color white, is often portrayed through a narrow window uncomplicated by the strictures of race and power that framed the Amendment then and now.
This is in rightful sankofa remembrance and raising up again our foremother, Sojourner Truth, fearless truth speaker who declared with great courage and conviction that she would not run away and hide from the devil but face him. And defeat his evil intentions and enslaving impositions on her and her people and open up righteous ways to move forward in the interest of history and humankind.
“Towards the Mountaintop: Commemorating Dr. King” is a live stage event to honor the 50th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King’s passing and the 55th anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.
Since the beginning of its inception, women have dedicated their lives to shaping and transforming America into the country we see today. This week, we kick-off the celebration of Women’s History Month by paying homage to a few women of color, who have rallied for change both locally and nationally.
May 31, 1881 – Booker T. Washington was recommended by General Armstrong for the principalship of the newly planned Tuskegee Institute.
For her, as an ardent abolitionist, there was no greater sin than the Holocaust of enslavement
Every day I wear a pair of medallions around my neck with portraits of two of my role models: Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth. As a child I read books about Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad. She and indomitable and eloquent slave woman Sojourner Truth represent countless thousands of anonymous slave women whose bodies and minds were abused and whose voices were muted by slavery, Jim Crow, segregation and confining gender roles throughout our nation’s history. Although Harriet Tubman could not read books, she could read the stars to find her way north to freedom. And she freed not only herself from slavery, but returned to slave country again and again through forests and streams and across mountains to lead other slaves to freedom at great personal danger. She was tough. She was determined. She was fearless. She was shrewd and she trusted God completely to deliver her, and other fleeing slaves, from pursuing captors who had placed a bounty on her life.