Sojourner Truth

She was born Isabella Baumfree, enslaved on a Dutch-speaking farm in Ulster County, New York, around 1797, and was sold for the first time at about nine, with a flock of sheep thrown in. She was beaten for not understanding English. She bore five children, and when her owner broke a promise to free her a year before New York's emancipation law took effect, she walked off the farm in 1826 carrying her baby daughter.

The following year she learned that her five-year-old son Peter had been sold illegally to a planter in Alabama. With help from Quakers she took the case to court and won, one of the first times a Black woman had successfully sued a white man in the United States. Peter came home with scars across his back.

In 1843 she took the name Sojourner Truth, saying she had been called to travel and speak. She could not read or write, dictated her life story to a friend and sold it at her meetings, along with portrait cards captioned "I sell the shadow to support the substance". At a women's rights convention in Akron, Ohio, in 1851 she gave the speech later remembered as "Ain't I a Woman?", though the version most people know was written up years afterwards in a Southern dialect she never spoke.

During the Civil War she recruited Black soldiers, met Abraham Lincoln, and worked among freed people in Washington, where she forced streetcars to carry Black passengers. She died in Battle Creek, Michigan, in 1883.