Harriet Tubman + Sojourner Truth = T & T Courage

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Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth stand as two of the most powerful architects of American freedom, not because they held formal authority, but because they refused to accept the limits placed on their humanity. Each emerged from enslavement with a radically different temperament: Truth, wielding words like a hammer, Tubman, wielding action like a blade, but together they reshaped the moral landscape of a nation built on bondage.

Sojourner Truth was born around 1797 in Ulster County, New York, enslaved under the name Isabella Baumfree. Unlike most enslaved people in the Deep South, she grew up in a Dutch-speaking household and experienced a slightly different, though still brutal, version of bondage. She was sold multiple times, separated from her parents and siblings, and subjected to physical violence.

She never learned to read or write, but her lack of formal schooling did not limit her intellect. Truth absorbed language by listening, memorizing Scripture, and sharpening her mind through lived experience. When New York passed a law gradually abolishing slavery, she seized her freedom ahead of schedule, eventually suing a white man in court to recover her young son, who had been illegally sold into slavery in the South.

She won, becoming one of the first Black women to successfully challenge a white man in a U.S. court.

After renaming herself Sojourner Truth in 1843, she began traveling the country as an itinerant preacher, abolitionist, and women’s rights advocate. Her deep, musical, and fearless voice could command a room. Her most famous speech, often called “Ain’t I a Woman?”, delivered at a women’s rights convention in Ohio, confronted both racism and sexism at once, insisting that Black women deserved the same rights and dignity as anyone else.

Truth was not a polished intellectual in the traditional sense; she was something more dangerous to injustice: a living contradiction to the lie of Black inferiority.

Harriet Tubman was born Araminta Ross around 1822 in Dorchester County, Maryland, under the far more violent slave system of the Deep South. As a child, she was beaten, starved, and nearly killed when a slave overseer threw a heavy metal weight at her head. The injury left her with lifelong seizures and visions, which she interpreted as spiritual guidance.

Tubman never learned to read or write, but she possessed an extraordinary memory, spatial intelligence, and emotional discipline. When she escaped slavery in 1849, she did not stay free. Instead, she returned again and again...at least 13 times...to guide more than 70 enslaved people to freedom through the Underground Railroad.

Tubman’s courage bordered on the mythic. She carried a gun not just for protection, but to ensure no one turned back and endangered the group. Every mission risked torture, death, or re-enslavement, yet she never lost a single person. During the Civil War, Tubman served the Union Army as a nurse, scout, and spy.

In 1863, she helped lead the Combahee River Raid in South Carolina, which freed more than 700 enslaved people in a single night—one of the largest emancipations of the war.

Left to right: Harriet Tubman; Gertie Davis (Tubman’s adopted daughter); Nelson Davis (Tubman’s husband); Lee Cheney; “Pop” Alexander; Walter Green; Sarah Parker (“Blind Auntie” Parker) and Dora Stewart (granddaughter of Tubman’s brother, John Stewart). Photo by William Cheney. Source Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture

Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman also fought after the war was over. Truth pushed for land grants and economic justice for formerly enslaved people, arguing that freedom without resources was another form of bondage. She continued speaking until she died in 1883.

Tubman settled in Auburn, New York, where she cared for the elderly and poor, including Black veterans. Despite her service, she struggled financially and was never properly paid by the government. She later became active in the women’s suffrage movement, standing alongside white feminists while insisting that Black Women should be included in the fight.

What binds these two women is not just their bravery, but their fierce independence. Neither waited for permission to act. Neither accepted the idea that education, respectability, or leadership belonged only to the privileged. They transformed suffering into strategy, faith into fuel, and personal survival into collective liberation.

Harriet Tubman in later life

 

Sojourner Truth in later life

Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman did not merely escape slavery. They redefined what freedom could mean: for themselves, for their people, and for a nation still struggling to live up to its ideals.

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