There's More to That How to Separate Fact From Myth in the Extraordinary Story of Sojourner Truth
The facts of Sojourner Truth’s life are inspiring: Born into slavery in the late 1790s, she became an influential abolitionist and Pentecostal preacher, transfixing audiences from the mid 1840s through the late 1870s with her candid and powerful voice, not to mention her singing. Tall and strong, Truth was physically formidable, too. No one was using the term “intersectionality” in the 19th century, but Truth embodied this idea, declaring that her Blackness and her womanhood were equally essential facets of her identity.
But many people, both in Truth’s lifetime and in the approximately 140 years since her death, have found it useful to recast Truth as they wish to remember her instead of as she was. There’s no better example of this than “Ain’t I a woman?,” the hypothetical that Truth supposedly put to the audience when she addressed a women’s rights convention in 1851 in Akron, Ohio—the city where a public plaza will be dedicated in her honor this spring. There’s reason to doubt she said that, or at least that she said it in that way.
In this episode, we speak with two historians who’ve dug into Truth’s complicated legacy and challenged much of what’s been written about this American icon. Cynthia Greenlee reported on recent efforts to honor Truth for the March 2024 issue of Smithsonian. Nell Irvin Painter wrote the groundbreaking 1996 biography Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol, and she’s hard at work on a follow-up volume titled Sojourner Truth Was a New Yorker and She Didn’t Say That. Together, Greenlee and Painter help us understand us who Sojourner Truth really was, and why several generations of activists have claimed her as a symbol — at the expense of our understanding of her as a person.
Read Cynthia Greenlee’s March 2024 Smithsonian story about Sojourner Truth here. You can learn more about Dr. Greenlee and her work at her site.
You can learn more about Dr. Nell Irvin Painter’s work as an author, artist, and historian at her site.
And read more here for the history of Mar-a-Lago mentioned in our dinner party fact.
Find prior episodes of our show here.
There’s More to That is a production of Smithsonian magazine and PRX Productions.
From the magazine, our team is Chris Klimek, Debra Rosenberg and Brian Wolly.
From PRX, our team is Jessica Miller, Adriana Rosas Rivera, Genevieve Sponsler, Rye Dorsey, and Edwin Ochoa. The Executive Producer of PRX Productions is Jocelyn Gonzales.
Fact-checking by Stephanie Abramson.
Episode artwork by Emily Lankiewicz.
Music by APM Music.