Sojourner Truth (ca. 1799-1883) is renowned for her work as an itinerant preacher and public speaker. During the nineteenth century, she was best known for her spontaneously devout reply to Frederick Douglass's 1847 suggestion that God had abandoned African Americans: "Frederick, is God dead?" Truth is remembered today for another rhetorical question she asked at a convention of women's rights advocates in 1850. Suggesting that the feminist movement had marginalized African American women, Truth asked the convention of suffragists, "Ar'n't I a woman?" Made famous by Harriet Beecher Stowe in an 1863 Atlantic Monthly article, Truth was dubbed the "Libyan Sibyl" and became a national icon of the evangelical and abolitionist movements.
Narrative of Sojourner Truth: a Northern Slave : Annotated