at 6:45, "telling the american story" with lonnie bunch. explore american history tv this weekend on c-span3. university of mary washington history professor claudine ferrell discusses the life and history of sojourner truth. claudine ferrell received her b.a. and m.a. in history. now at texas state university. she taught u.s. and texas history at lamar university in beaumont for three years before entering the doctoral program at rice university where she

focused on american legal and constitutional history and african-american history. her dissertation was on the unsuccessful effort to pass a federal law against lynching in 1917 through 1922. a year at kansas state university was followed by her coming to fredricksburg and the then mary washington college. at umw she teaches legal, constitutional and african-american history as well as a wide array of courses, including the gilded days, the progressive era, the united states and vietnam, u.s. since 1945, america's small wars, the american home front during the world wars and american disasters. in addition to the history department's two-course methods sequence for majors. and she is currently chair of the department of history and american studies. it's my pleasure to introduce dr. claudine ferrell.

first, i want to thank bill crawley for doing a wonderful job with the great lecture series for years and years, and i also want to thank him for his brief moment working at gw because i got to replace him and that's how i got hired here at mary washington. but as you know, there is no replacing bill crawley. i also want to thank power for sponsoring this lecture. sojourner truth was certainly a unique woman, and beyond anyone's measure, an impressive one. but to what degree she was she's things is impossible to know for a variety of reasons that i'm going to be emphasizing today. like most former slaves, even frederick douglas who wrote

extensively and spoke extensively, there are details about her life that we don't know, that i think in many ways she did not know. and certainly there were details about her life that she refused to share, and i will be discussing those as well. she comes to us largely through the lens of whites, of white america, through friend and foe, through supporters and opponents, through people who were curious and judgmental, so people who actually knew her and then people who just met her in passing. and for whatever reason, she ensured that that was the case. she clearly spoke her mind, we know that. we have enough to indicate that. and she did that over about at least half of her 86 years. she walked over much of this country, she did verbal battles with some of the most important

and skilled debaters of the time, so we know a lot about her, but it still pretty much comes from white audiences, from white photographers, newspaper reporters, allies, opponents. and it comes in a way that represents the racial thinking of the time period, because this was a time period of racism, but also sexism and classism. but it also comes from us and how we interpret what we hear, what we read about sojourner truth. and in this day and age, we want a strong woman. we want a strong black woman. and she certainly, in many ways, can fit that bill. we need to remember that while many states by the mid-1800s had abolished slavery, and then

after 1865, of course, with the 13th amendment, the entire country was free of slavery, racism, racial thinking was alive and well. it was supported by 19th century science, religion, history, society. the woman we know as sojourner truth lived and preached in this time, and that limited what she, as a woman, as a black, as a former slave, could do and how she was perceived. that affected how she thought and spoke and lived and how her story has become known to us. so who was sojourner truth? she is freedom to some who visit the many monuments to her throughout the u.s. she is also liberty and equal

rights for african-americans, for women. she is assertiveness and pride. she is without a doubt an impressive woman, debater, speaker, storyteller. she's an inspiration. she combined hard work, opportunities to speak, many of which she created herself, her story, with some gaps in there and some additions. god's message. and even her striking physical appearance and voice. enough to have a congresswoman's cat named after her and mars rover bear her chosen name. innumerable children's books and paper dolls. a biography by one of the nation's most respected historians. a google doodle. never knew that word before.

a day in her honor in the state she adopted, statues, museums, memorials dedicated to her words, dedicated to her actions. enough to indicate the importance of what she accomplished in her 86 years, or, i might add, her 103 or 105 years, because she gave different times and everybody assumed she was older than what she was. she did not look, sound or behave the way women or slaves or free blacks were supposed to, and it was more than about her causes, which were abolitionism and equal rights after that and women's rights. to 1800s' white americans, she was unfeminine, exotic, and not in a positive way, deviant. she was disgusting, a curiosity, grotesque. these are all terms used to describe her in the 1850s and

1860s. she violated norms for blacks and for women, although until she walked away, her term, from slavery in 1826, probably not so much did she violate the norms of a slave. she was assertive, angry, witty, she grabbed and controlled attention. she performed. she should be up here right now. she asserted her freedom and her views, all of which she shared with god. she spoke to white audiences, she spoke to women and men, she initiated lawsuits to free her son, to sue a white couple who slandered her, to charge a conductor with assault and battery. she had much to prove. she won lawsuits. she was arrested more than once. she attempted to vote. she petitioned congress, or at least tried to.

she met presidents. three, in fact. she wrote, dictated her biography. she supported herself through physical labor and through her photographs. she reinvented herself. and through all of this, she was illiterate. the story of sojourner truth actually begins a couple centuries before her. it begins in colonial new netherlands. and what you have on the screen there are a couple of images that show you where the dutch settled in the 1620s and what new amsterdam, their headquarters, in modern day manhattan. within just a couple of years, slaves started arriving from africa. these slaves cleared land, split logs, milled lumber, they built

wharves, you could see the need for them, roads and fortifications. in some cases they were allowed to be half free, kind of on their own for a year but working for the colony when needed. they were certainly seen as integral to the colony, but they were also seen as unequal and they were exploited. the english came about 40, 50 years later, and that's the beginning of new york. and that's where sojourner truth grew up, and that's where she spent a good part of her life. not mississippi, not alabama, not virginia, not the typical southern slave states. with the english came more restrictions, came limitations on blacks being free, came some negatives, came fear of black uprisings, came the slave market, and new york was a major slave market at the time.

what did the slaves do there? mainly around new york and the counties nearby. they did farming, not on the scale that you see in the south. they were house servants, they were manufacturing workers, they had skill jobs. they were goldsmiths, silversmiths, shoe makers, blacksmiths. they did a little bit of everything that required skill and many jobs that did not require skill. they also served on ships, and one of sojourner truth's sons would sail away on a whaling vessel. by 1700, a little over 50% of new york was black. that would go up and down a little bit and certainly would be affected by the american revolution. as the images here demonstrate,

african-americans, they were kind of developing the use of that label, fought on both sides. they influenced a lot of thinking that was already starting to change by that time. they were raising issues themselves and their white supporters about how could americans complain about british enslavement of the colonies when the colonials themselves were enslaving people? so you had national rights philosophy starting to grow more and more. you also have the changes that came with the freedom granted african-american slaves who fought for either side, and you have economic changes that were coming at this time of the country's history. and not just in virginia. that is going to switch more and more from tobacco and wheat and other grains, but through half

the country where white laborers started to assume more of the jobs since there were fewer slaves in those areas. the result was that increasingly in new york where there was one slave per seven white new yorkers, now there was 1 per 12 white new yorkers. and new yorkers started to think more and more as did other colonies, now states, that slavery had to end. now, the complication of that, of course, is you're in slavery but you still have a large inferior population that you don't particularly respect or want or believe deserve the same rights and opportunities that you do. as you can see from this map, new york is titled with having abolished or ended slavery in 1799. that, in fact, is two years after sojourner truth was born. and that is going to have an

effect on her and her family. because what we see here in new york is that they had a substantial number of slaves as late as 1790. and if you look at this and you see the highlighted area from new york, new york's slave population was fairly substantial up until the time that abolition actually truly existed in new york. because new york passed an abolition law that said if a child was born to a woman who was enslaved after july 4th, 1799, that child would be free. if it was a male child, it would be free in 28 years. if it was a female child, she would be free in 25 years. the mother and the siblings born before that date, they were still a slave. so that was new york's first attempt. and sojourner truth was born

before that date, and her children will be born after that date. so in theory, there are a lot of slaves in new york, including sojourner truth and her family. i will explain, her name wasn't sojourner truth at this time. she was born in ulster county, new york on the farm of colonel hardenburg. she had five owners in her lifetime. she spent the longest time with john dumont, her last owner. she spent about 16 years with him. and when she left, she was 28, 29, so you could see that most of her time as a young teenager and young adult was with john dumont and his wife sally.

isabella bumfree or isabel bumfree grew up in this part of new york, and this is a dutch part of new york. so if you ever hear somebody delivering one of sojourner truth's talks that has a southern slave mississippi dialect, it's wrong. she had troubles switching from dutch to english, and english became her primary language, but there are certainly difficulties in trying to imagine her speaking if you imagine her as a southern slave. she was a northern woman. she was a new yorker. and that affected a lot of her travels and a lot of her thinking. she was one of perhaps 12 children. perhaps the youngest, perhaps the next youngest. she grew very tall, and we'll

get to that in a little bit. and she was seen as an extremely hard-working, indispensable, trustworthy young woman. apparently she saw her lot in life as a slave as one that she took very seriously, that the white adults, the whites who owned and controlled and beat her and abused her, that they were god. they were her small world, her existence. she might have gotten in trouble now and then. she liked, apparently, to drink if she could get some liquor and to smoke, which she continued to do most of her life. but she was a hard worker who took her responsibilities very seriously. and that is something that historians have tried to figure out how that affected her in the rest of her life. at what point did she develop the self-confidence, the reinvention of this capable,

strong, self-confident woman? because it did not exist from all the stories she tells in her narrative, which she published in 1850 when then she was about 53 years old, about who she was growing up. we know from her narrative that john dumont beat her. apparently he cared deeply about her, but he beat her. there is no evidence that he sexually abused her or anything like that. the evidence of that is apparently in relation to his wife. in her narrative, sojourner truth refers to things that she cannot name, things that were unnatural and abhorrent that happened with sally dumont, and she did not talk about that. scholars have speculated fairly seriously that she was sexually abused by mrs. dumont. and there was a fairly deep

anger and hatred of her, although when sally dumont was dying, here comes sojourner truth to take care of her. that was part of her responsibility. during her time with john dumont and his wife, she did a lot of tasks and he often praised her for being stronger, more capable, more hard-working than any of the men he ever had working on the farm, both slave and freed. she, though, had some calling from god, and it was in this early time that she set up a kind of meditation place. there was a little island in the middle of a stream surrounded by some willows and she would go there to talk to god. she would go there to communicate. she would go there, in some ways, i suspect, simply to get through her existence. well, what happened is when she was probably about 15, 16 years old, she had a romantic

relationship with a young slave from another farm. the owner of that slave, the owner of the other farm, broke it off and apparently almost beat the young man to death to keep him away. so isabella/isabel then married, which new york law allowed, a young man on her own, a young slave on her own plantation -- sorry, her own farm and bore five children. historians believe they were all her husband's, thomas. they believe, but they're not 100% sure because of the timing and because there is a missing child. we know things that happened with her son peter, because she goes to court to protect him, and she takes him to new york city with her later. we know about her three daughters, diana, elizabeth and sophia, because they wind up

spending many years with her much later in life. we don't know about a fifth child. was this a boy who died? was this a daughter that she introduces later, because there's evidence she introduced another young woman as her daughter. we don't know. and we don't know for sure who the father is, particularly of the first two children. was it the young man who was beaten and sent away? was it thomas? potentially was it john dumont who i don't think anybody seriously, seriously thinks that. anyway, what makes the story interesting is the control that isabel took. her agreement with john dumont is that because of all of her hard work, she would be free in 1826, ahead of a new new york law. in 1817, new york passed another law and said in 1827, we're done with slavery. that's it. you are now free. you don't have to wait that

extra time. and that meant sojourner -- isabel -- would be free. her deal with john dumont was that she would be free earlier. he reneged on the deal, he said, because she had injured her right hand earlier and hadn't been able to do as much work that she couldn't get off. she hadn't done the work necessary to earn that. her solution, as she put it, was to walk away. so she took her youngest daughter sophia, newly born, and left. and her explanation for that is fairly straightforward. the slaveholders are terrible for promising to give you this or that if you do thus and so. and when the time of fulfillment comes and one claims a promise, they, forsoothe, recollect

nothing of the kind. you are then taunted as a liar or accused of not completing your contract. interestingly enough, when isabel left with sophia, she ends up with another family, and they understand up paying john dumont for a while in order to safeguard and secure her so there were no problems with that. so what you have is this young woman changing her name as she redefines, still in a fairly halting way, her identity from isabella bumfree to isabella

wagenen. and fairly down the line she changes her name to the name we all know about her. so the question remains, what happened in those years? we pretty much know what happened in 1850, because in 1850, she starts her public life, her walking, her preaching, her showing up at conferences, her being reported on in newspapers, her meeting with presidents that's going to follow. we know about those things. but what happened in the time in between? well, in this early period, she moved to kingston, new york, and we know she was working there. she did a lot of domestic work often, generally, with white families who became important to her in terms of certifying her

i understand -- independence. she did eventually leave with her son peter and left the girls in care at ulster county. she started preaching in camp meetings and on street corners. we'll get to that in just a second. in new york she lived outside of a black community, if there was one. new york at this time had a couple hundred thousand people, and it did not have any concentrated area of black population like we're going to see early in the next century in harlem. and she also joined a cult, the kingdom of methias. and what happens in the next period, and there are some things that change here in 1843 after she changes her name. she starts preaching more broadly and she decides to share her story as many ex-slaves,

former slaves, were doing at this time. so one of the major stories about her in that early period was the fact that this young woman, illiterate, uneducated, walked much of new york as she went to find help because her baby boy, peter, who was only about six or seven years old, had been illegally sold. new york law prohibited the selling or movement of blacks outside of new york in order to avoid the emancipation law. he had been sold to john dumont to his brother and to another and to another and wound up being taken to alabama by a plantation owner. and isabel went to john dumont's wife and pleaded with her. went to the alabama plantation owner before she headed to alabama. she was from new york, and

pleaded with her, and they gave this slave woman no consideration at all as a mother, which apparently really fired up isabel. she was able to get legal help. it took about a year, but it was in this courthouse that the judge ruled that the child belonged with his mother and nobody else. it was traumatic for her because when peter was first brought back to her, he had been so traumatized by what to him had been presented as his mother's abandonment that he screamed and claimed that she was not his mother. and it took a while before that trauma of slavery. she also discovered more trauma. he was bruised, he was scarred, he clearly had been beaten, whipped and brutalized down in alabama in just that short amount of time.

isabel kind of lost it and did a curse for what had happened, that the damage that had been done to her son should be doubled from those who did it. sadly she found out soon afterward that the wife of this planter had also been beaten to death by her husband in alabama. there was just a lot of trauma that went with this story. but she did get her son peter, and he will remain with her until he's about 19 years old. apparently he was a little bit of a wild child, a little bit of a rebellious teenager, and one of the black leaders in new york recommended that, like a lot of young men at that time, he needed to get his act together and they often sent young men out to sea on the ships. and that would help them toughen up and turn their lives around, and so that's what peter did. she got letters from him for a

while. i think it was five letters, and then she never heard from him again. so there is no ending to that story. we really don't know what happened. then there is the kingdom of methias. apparently if you want to read a scandalous book, you can read the book on the kingdom of methias. this was kind of out of a success, struggling carpenter, who presented himself as a profit, presented himself as jesus christ, presented himself in different ways and was able to get some wealthy people to give him money and give them property, and the property was just about 30 miles north of new york in what is now sing-sing, or where the sing-sing prison was, and he collected a variety of people, including isabel, who

worked for him and apparently did a lot of heavy, difficult work, was beaten again, and this is part of when historians see her as still struggling to reframe herself, to resee herself as somebody who doesn't deserve that, and that isn't a natural part of how she should be treated or how anybody should be treated. what makes this story particularly useful for her, he turned the cult into a sex cult. he assigned people different partners. she apparently was safe from that. she just wound up doing more and more work as a result of these sexual relationships that were going on. one of the men who was involved died. there was talk that he had been poisoned. isabel was charged with the murder, and because she was in support of him, she was accused

as being part of this murder. she decided that hurt her nme, that that hurt her. she was able, with some friends and the testimony of john dumont among other whites, to sue the people who made the accusation and she won the lawsuit. and she won $125, which to us -- i'd be happy to get $125 right now, but $125 back in the mid-1830s is probably the equivalent of at least 10,000, depending on how you compute it, and maybe closer to $100,000 in terms of how it placed you in the economic scale. so this was a big moment for her to assert earlier her motherhood, and now to assert her good name, that she could testify, because she had to testify, but blacks were not

perceived to be honorable. they were not perceived to be trustworthy, they were not perceived to be people who, under oath, would tell the truth. and so she had to get this validation from the many whites she knew, and she got money and support for all of this from them as well. the speculation is these cases are adding up for her as something that she needs to redefine herself as a result of. so what happens is in 1843, right at the tail end of all of this, she makes a decision to change her name. now, by this point, too, she has become increasingly involved with elements of what's called the second great awakening. a lot of direct, personal rethinking of one's connection with god. a lot of communication, a lot of preaching, a lot of camp

revivals, a lot of, in many cases, yelling and physical demonstrations. it was part for her of a methodism, because she was methodist. it was part of a directionism called perfectionism which emphasized plain living, plain dress which she will carry on the rest of her life, including the bonnet, the turban. it also involved listening to the holy spirit and conveying him which some people did in very rousing, disruptive camp meetings which very much distressed her. she did not go for that at all. but it emphasized purification, it emphasized corruption. that was a very important part to her. in fact, she argued that she had been called by the spirit to

leave new york city, which she defined as a wicked city. maybe. we all might think of new york in that way when we get off of broadway or whatever, but there was a wickedness to the city, so she had to leave. and she left and started going to meet people she had met before and going to various revivals up into new england, and i'll show you in a minute a map of some of the places that she went. because this was a woman who went where she thought she was needed. and so that need meant she was going to preach. and if she was going to preach the truth, and if she was going to travel to do it, then sojourner truth. sojourner is somebody who stays in a place briefly. is someone who visits and leaves. someone who sojourns is going to stay in different places, not in

one place. for her the idea is you told the truth, and she will emphasize that over and over throughout her life. so sojourner truth, often just sojourner for a lot of people, but this was the beginning of her travels. i found a later map, this is 1880, but it does show you some of the places she went with some of the states that are developing as she was traveling, because not all of them existed initially because she was going into some of these brand new states and territories. she winds up living and dying, her death is in michigan, so she travels a lot and most of this is through walking. this was a strong woman, even when she was injured. she refused to take things easy. she even refused to be stopped -- she tried to go into indiana right after indiana had passed a law. indiana didn't have slavery, but indiana also didn't want blacks,

so it passed a law from prohibiting blacks from moving into the state. and she refused to let that stop her, and she was arrested as a result. but she kept struggling. she dressed plainly, an apron, a shawl, a bonnet, a turban, simple dresses generally. you can tell by her image she's very dark. she was often defined as not a mixed african-american like frederick douglas, for example, that she was a true african. we don't know anything, really, beyond her parents. some really struggled to deal with her. she clearly was not a lady in the way mid-19th century ladies, meaning white and middle/upper class ladies were. she didn't behave that way. she spoke out in public, she

laughed, she sang, she was tall, her walk was very firm. she just did not meet the image of what she was supposed to meet. which made her, some people have argued, less threatening and more likely to be listened to but also maybe more likely not to be taken seriously. so she was a combination there struggling with this. the average slave, based on at least some ship records, female was 5'3" and the average man 5'7". today in the united states the average woman is 5'4", so not much of a difference. sojourner truth was 6 feet tall, so she really stood out, not just among women but among men. she had a strong, coarse voice. she was emphatic when she wanted to make her points, and then she was selling her narrative.

because in 1850, she decided she needed to sell her story to tell her story as many freed slaves, runaway slaves, had done, frederick douglas being the most famous of them. and so she dictated this. now, remember, she was illiterate. she could not read or write. in fact -- i think i have it here -- that's the only writing we have of her. and that apparently is her effort to write her name. that's all we have. the question is what was happening here? there is some suggestions that maybe she had a learning disability. maybe some birth defect or injury or something, but she made it a point of emphasizing she could not read and write, and there were those who tried to explain, well, what was going on earlier in her life that she

didn't learn, and there were efforts to teach her by some of the children or whatever, and they said she just didn't get it. there was something not connecting with her, whether it was obstinancy or some sort of disability. anyway, she dictated. people asked, how does she know so much about the bible? because she dictated the bible a lot. she tended to have children read the bible to her. apparently if an adult read the bible and she asked hem to repeat it and repeat it and repeat it so she could understand, she starred adding their own commentary, their own clarification. she said children were as patient as could be. they would read it over and over and over to her so she finally could register it and remember it. for her narrative, she dictated this to a white friend of hers, and this woman, olive gilbert,

put it together with some commentary, and those are explicit. this is going to be the base of what we know about sojourner truth. later in life after the civil war, additional additions will be published. some of those later editions will include her scrapbook. things that she had collected over time that kind of added and clarified her story from 1850 on. but this is what we have. so anything about her personal insight as a slave or her years afterwards and what she doesn't want to say comes from this. just to give you some ideas of what this woman was talking about, i'm going to read you some things that happened in the newspapers of the time. sojourner truth, the poor old slave woman, reviewed the previous sermon with a power of discrimination. i never in my life saw exceeded

if equalled. in the terrible crucible of her criticism, she melted it down and down until it showed to be nothing of purpose at all. to be able to read one word, she exhibited a power of rude but keen analysis such as most professional critics must covet in vain. one of the most famous abolitionist speakers said, her appeal can electrify the congregation that cannot be denied. those in the convention would lend a helping hand, presenting in quaint and homely form, truths that will per chance be remembered longer than if it had been clothed in the most elegant language. sojourner truth led off in words that scathed like the very

lightnings. truth would sometimes put the politicians in the most ugly difficulty. a whole premise with complication in a single question. she made one of her choice short speeches full of rich thoughts and marked by her confiding faith and truth and her ernest love of humanity. if there was no other count in the indictment of slavery than this, that it had doomed a soul such as hers to the long robberies and sorrows of slavery, it were enough, enough to doom the policy of any church or party that should consent to such an outrage upon a human soul. sojourner truth would show beneath her dark skin and

uncoming exterior, there was a true womanly heart. she uttered some truths that told well. she said women set the world wrong by eating the forbidden fruit and now she was going to set it right. she said forgiveness had no beginning. it was everlasting and could never die. but eve had a beginning and must have an end. she expressed great reverence for god and faith that he will bring about his own purpose and plans. she had a meeting with frederick douglas who did not think all that well of her uncultured speaking and behavior and all that, but he was talking about his pessimism about the future of america, about black america, and her response was, is god dead? like, he'll take care of it. is god dead? in fact, that will be on her tombstone. with her long, bony arms, she

shows an appearance that is grotesque and ludicrous but yet demands attention. she carries not a heart of fire but a heart of love. she did not support herself by these speeches. she would just sometimes show up, sometimes was invited. she supported herself by being there and selling her narrative and then later by selling her portraits. this was a period of what somebody called cardomania, these calling cards with her portrait, and on it, it refers to the fact that she sells the shadow to support the substance, so she sells the shadow, the image of her, to support her in her life. probably most famous for this woman who certainly had to be a striking presence for most people was her involvement not just with the effort to argue against slavery but the effort

for women's rights. and she is certainly well known for that along with elizabeth katie stanton, the women for women's suffrage in the country, but so is her "i ain't woman" speech. allegedly she said, that man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages and lifted over ditches and to have the best place everywhere. nobody ever helps me into carriages or over mud puddles or gives me any best place, and ain't i a woman? look at my arms. i plowed and worked in barns. ain't i a woman? i can work and eat as much as a man when i could get it.

ain't i a woman? i have borne 13 children. that's the report of what she said, and seen most sold out to slavery. and when i called out in my grief, only my mother heard me. ain't i a woman? that goes back to the white audiences i was talking about. the person who recorded her for the newspaper, her speech, had a fairly short version of it. years later, i think it was the president of the association -- sorry -- presented a much longer version, substantially longer, and we tend to go with the much, much longer version. it's a much more emphatic, demanding, in-your-face sojourner truth. but it also seems to have more of a purpose for the women's

rights movement. the woman was a major women's rights activist. so was the story distorted? was information changed? and also, when you listen to this speech on youtube or wherever, you do tend to get a southern accent to it, a real slave emphasis where you almost see the cotton fields. what one group has tried to do is find women who speak dutch and then have them read it. they are english speakers but have a dutch background, to try to get a little more authenticity. what they do is they've kind of recorded parts of each version of this speech. rather than get anything really long, i have a very short clip of it, and this is what i was reading to you, and you get this repetition of it.

so let's see if this works. >> well, children, i reckon there must be something out of kilter. i think the negroes of the south and the women of the north all talking about rights, the white men will be in a fix pretty soon. what's all this here talk about? that man over there says women need to be helped into carriages and lifted over ditches and to have the best place everywhere. nobody ever helps me into a carriage or over mud puddles or gives me the best place. ain't i a woman? >> this is just part of the mystery of sojourner truth. what did she say, how did she sound, what was her emphasis,

what was she there? not just invitation or not invitation, but what was her intent for all of this? what was she trying to get across? because what happens after the 1850 narrative and beyond is she is really a crusader for a lot of things, and that includes during the civil war for the union and after the civil war for the freed people who now are crowding the streets of washington, d.c., for example, that she helps care for. but what's going to be their fate? are they going to be dependents on the government? what's going to happen to them? and so that's when she actually puts together a petition to try to get congress, and she travels all over walking to get signatures, to provide land in the west for them. she also meets with abraham lincoln. as i have up there, this is not a photograph, obviously. it's a painting done, and we do

know, though, that she met with lincoln. the problem is we don't know, just like her "ain't i a woman" speech, what exactly happened there. her account of it is very, very positive, that lincoln shook her hand, that lincoln was very positive to her, that she -- you know, she thanked him forie -- emancipating the slaves, and he said, no, don't give me credit. he said, you're important to me, i've heard of you for a long time, and she said, i've heard of you, too. the woman who got her the meeting with lincoln indicates that lincoln was quite the opposite of all of that. he was not friendly. he was fairly sour when he met with her. he called her auntie, a standard term for older black women. he clearly, according to this

woman who was called back in after sojourner truth was quickly ushered out, did not want to talk about the emancipation proclamation, did not want to certainly discuss this with a black woman. so we get two stories again, so it's really difficult to know just what's going on. we do know what happened with her petition. she never got it to congress, but the so-called exodusters of the 1870s did what she wanted. they moved. african-americans moved west and set up their own farms and built their own homes and sought protection and help on their own. for sojourner truth, she winds up in michigan. i remember the first time i ran into that, i was going, michigan? why michigan? she was invited there by some quakers, and apparently really

liked this utopian village, harmonia, that was right outside the town of battle creek. she wound up buying land in battle creek and settling there, as did her daughters and their husbands and their children and all of that. and it was in battle creek that she died in 1883 at the age of 86. not 103, not 105 as her tombstone indicates, and her comment, is that god? not "ain't i a woman," but is that god? i think she probably would rather have god on the tombstone with her. that in some ways seems like an abrupt end to a woman's life that was more than abrupt. i like to think of sojourner truth as one of these women,

because black women have played major roles in american history. but those roles are generally not public, they're not national, they're not really studied. obviously these women indicate that there is some exceptions. these are women who made their mark in education and government, in business, in civil rights movement, in many different ways. she certainly fits with them, but for most of these women, and you may not recognize all of them, but these were really, and are, really influential women of their times. when sojourner truth died, thomas fortune, soon to be editor of a fairly black newspaper, said although the name sojourner truth is a name

among people, only one in ten blacks know who she is. part of the problem was she was a northerner, not a southerner. she didn't escape like harriet tubman numerous times and risk her life rescuing people. she walked away from slavery, she went to court, she sang songs, she gave speeches, she stopped debates dead in their tracks with her focussed comments. so i think i'm not the only one in the country who is still a little bit lost about who sojourner truth really was. but one thing we all know, that she fought battles. battles in her internal life, battles with her family, battles with society. she fought battles. and she and the others have fought battles for their rights,

for their life, and i would certainly argue, and i think she would totally agree, for her country. weeknights this month we're featuring american history tv programs as a preview of what's available every weekend on c-span3. american history tv continues to mark women's history month. tonight we'll show a 1987 film from our reel america series, "crossing borders," the story of the international women's league for peace and freedom about the organization founded in 1915 to end world war i and for peace and women's rights. watch tonight at 8:00 p.m. eastern and enjoy american history tv every weekend on c-span3. american history tv on c-span3, exploring the people and events that tell the american story every weekend. coming up this weekend, saturday at 10:00 p.m. eastern, on reel

america, with the nomination of academy award nominees, we choose three films that won academy awards. "library of congress" from 1945, "with these hands" from 1950, and "why man creates" from 1968. sunday at 2:00 pvm eastern, cleveland sellers on "the orangeburg massacre." and we visit the museum of the u.s. army with lonnie bunch.

american history tv on c-span3 every weekend documenting america's story. funding for american history tv comes from these companies who support c-span3 as a public service. up next, civil rights activist cleveland sellers talks about his work in the 1960s as a national leader with the student non-violent coordinating committee. he also accounts the 1968 orangeburg massacre where south carolina state troopers fired on students protesting segregation. three students were killed and mr. sellers were among the nearly 30 who were wounded. former south carolina mayor joseph riley conducts this interview. >> i'm joe riley. i'm former mayor of the city of charleston, professor at the citadel, my