Ain't I a Woman?

On May 29 in Black History...

In 1851, Sojourner Truth delivers her "Ain't I A Woman" speech.  "Ain't I A Woman?" is the name given to a speech, delivered extemporaneously, by Sojourner Truth, (1797–1883), born a slave in New York State. Some time after gaining her freedom in 1827, she became a well known anti-slavery speaker. Her speech was delivered at the Women's Convention in Akron, Ohio, on May 29, 1851, and was not originally known by any title.  In her speech, Truth argued that while American culture often placed white women upon a pedestal and gave them certain privileges (most notably that of not working), this attitude was not extended toblack women.  The speech received wider publicity in 1863 during the American Civil War when Frances Dana Barker Gage published a different version, one which became known as Ain't I a Woman? because of its oft-repeated question. This later version was the one recorded in most history books.


The first version of the speech was published by Marius Robinson, an abolitionist and newspaper editor who was present at the convention, and very interested in reporting about Truth. Robinson's account of the speech included not one instance of the question "Ain't I a Woman," let alone four repetitions of it. Instead, the only question that Robinson recorded was Truth asking "...can any man do more than that?"  Marius Robinson, who worked with Truth, recorded his version of the speech in the June 21, 1851, issue of the Anti-Slavery Bugle:


"I want to say a few words about this matter. I am a woman's rights. I have as much muscle as any man, and can do as much work as any man. I have plowed and reaped and husked and chopped and mowed, and can any man do more than that? I have heard much about the sexes being equal. I can carry as much as any man, and can eat as much too, if I can get it. I am as strong as any man that is now. As for intellect, all I can say is, if a woman have a pint, and a man a quart – why can't she have her little pint full? You need not be afraid to give us our rights for fear we will take too much, – for we can't take more than our pint'll hold. The poor men seems to be all in confusion, and don't know what to do. Why children, if you have woman's rights, give it to her and you will feel better. You will have your own rights, and they won't be so much trouble. I can't read, but I can hear. I have heard the bible and have learned that Eve caused man to sin. Well, if woman upset the world, do give her a chance to set it right side up again. The Lady has spoken about Jesus, how he never spurned woman from him, and she was right. When Lazarus died, Mary and Martha came to him with faith and love and besought him to raise their brother. And Jesus wept and Lazarus came forth. And how came Jesus into the world? Through God who created him and the woman who bore him. Man, where was your part? But the women are coming up blessed be God and a few of the men are coming up with them. But man is in a tight place, the poor slave is on him, woman is coming on him, he is surely between a hawk and a buzzard."


Twelve years later in May 1863, Frances Dana Barker Gage published a very different version. In it, she gave Truth many of the speech characteristics of Southern slaves, and she inserted new material that Robinson didn't report. Gage's version of the speech was republished in 1875, 1881 and 1889, and became the historic standard. This version is known as "Ain't I a Woman?" after the oft-repeated refrain added by Gage.  Truth's own speech pattern was not Southern in nature, as she was born and raised in New York, and spoke only Dutch until she was nine years old.  The following is the speech as Gage recalled it in History of Woman Suffrage, which was, according to her, in the original dialect as it was presented by Sojourner Truth:

"Wall, chilern, whar dar is so much racket dar must be somethin' out o' kilter. I tink dat 'twixt de niggers of de Souf and de womin at de Norf, all talkin' 'bout rights, de white men will be in a fix pretty soon. But what's all dis here talkin' 'bout?"

"Dat man ober dar say dat womin needs to be helped into carriages, and lifted ober ditches, and to hab de best place everywhar. Nobody eber helps me into carriages, or ober mud-puddles, or gibs me any best place!" And raising herself to her full height, and her voice to a pitch like rolling thunder, she asked. 'And ain't I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! (and she bared her right arm to the shoulder, showing her tremendous muscular power). I have ploughed, and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain't I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man – when I could get it – and bear de lash as well! And ain't I a woman? I have borne thirteen chilern, and seen 'em mos' all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain't I a woman?"

"Den dey talks 'bout dis ting in de head; what dis dey call it?" ("Intellect," whispered someone near.) "Dat's it, honey. What's dat got to do wid womin's rights or nigger's rights? If my cup won't hold but a pint, and yourn holds a quart, wouldn't ye be mean not to let me have my little half-measure full?" And she pointed her significant finger, and sent a keen glance at the minister who had made the argument. The cheering was long and loud.

"Den dat little man in back dar, he say women can't have as much rights as men, 'cause Christ wan't a woman! Whar did your Christ come from?" Rolling thunder couldn't have stilled that crowd, as did those deep, wonderful tones, as she stood there with out-stretched arms and eyes of fire. Raising her voice still louder, she repeated, "Whar did your Christ come from? From God and a woman! Man had nothin' to do wid Him."

Oh, what a rebuke that was to that little man. Turning again to another objector, she took up the defense of Mother Eve. I can not follow her through it all. It was pointed, and witty, and solemn; eliciting at almost every sentence deafening applause; and she ended by asserting:

"If de fust woman God ever made was strong enough to turn de world upside down all alone, dese women togedder (and she glanced her eye over the platform) ought to be able to turn it back, and get it right side up again! And now dey is asking to do it, de men better let 'em." Long-continued cheering greeted this. "'Bleeged to ye for hearin' on me, and now ole Sojourner han't got nothin' more to say."

Sojourner Truth

"The Spirit calls me, and I must go."

Truth (1797 – 1883) was the self-given name, from 1843 onward, of Isabella Baumfree, an African-American abolitionist and women's rightsactivist. Truth was born into slavery in Swartekill, New York, but escaped with her infant daughter to freedom in 1826. After going to court to recover her son, she became the first black woman to win such a case against a white man. Her best-known extemporaneous speech on racial inequalities, Ain't I a Woman?, was delivered in 1851 at the Ohio Women's Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio. During the Civil War, Truth helped recruit black troops for the Union Army; after the war, Truth tried unsuccessfully to secure land grants from the federal government for former slaves.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sojourner_Truth
http://www.sojournertruth.org/History/Biography/Default.htm#Slavery
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ain%27t_I_a_Woman%3F

From Fugitive Slave to Citizen

On February 15 in Black History...

Black Abolitionists Invade Boston Courtroom and Rescue Shadrach Minkins, a Fugitive Slave

On Saturday morning, February 15, 1851, two officers posing as customers at Taft’s Cornhill Coffee House seized the waiter Shadrach Minkins, a “stout, copper-colored man,” who had escaped from slavery in Virginia and settled in Boston. Minkins was taken to the nearby courthouse for a hearing. Lawyers Robert Morris, Richard Henry Dana, Jr., Ellis Gray Loring and Samuel E. Sewall offered their services as Minkins’ counsel. They immediately filed a petition for writ of habeas corpus with the Supreme Judicial Court seeking Minkins' release from custody.

Lemuel Shaw, Chief Justice of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, refused to consider the defense’s habeas corpus petition. Later, a crowd of black and white abolitionists entered the courthouse, overcame armed guards and forced their way into the courtroom.

In a chaotic struggle, black abolitionists arrested Minkins from his court officers, carried him off and temporarily hid him in a Beacon Hill attic. From there, Boston black leaders Lewis Hayden, John J. Smith and others helped Minkins escape from Massachusetts, and he eventually found his way to Canada on the Underground Railroad. On an order from President Millard Fillmore, nine abolitionists, including Robert Morris, were indicted. Charges against some were dismissed, while others, including Morris and Hayden, faced a jury in court. Utimately, each was aquitted.  Source:  http://www.masshist.org/longroad/01slavery/minkins.htm


BOOK REVIEW:

 

Shadrach Minkins: From Fugitive Slave to Citizen by Gary Collison An impressive feat of detective work lies behind this portrait of Shadrach Minkins, the first black man arrested in New England under the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. Minkins had escaped from slavery in Virginia and come to Boston, where he was arrested in February 1851. Before his case could come to trial, however, a group of black citizens invaded the courtroom and spirited Minkins away. Thereafter, except for scattered newspaper accounts and anecdotes, Minkins was lost to history. In uncovering evidence that Minkins settled in Montreal, where he helped establish a community of blacks who fled slavery, author Gary Collison restores Minkins and paints a fascinating portrait of those troubled times.  Source:  http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/474939

Back to the Land of the Free

On February 6 in Black History...

In 1820, the first organized group of emigrating freed slaves departed on on February 6, The Elizabeth from New York to Freetown, Sierra Leone, in West Africa. The enterprise was organized by the American Colonization Society, founded in 1816 by educator Robert Finley (1772-1817) with the mission of returning freed American slaves to Africa. Finley had taught in Charleston, S.C., a slave-importing port. In 1819, Congress had authorized the return of freed black slaves. The lawmakers appropriated $100,000, a large sum at the time, to be used in returning displaced Africans who had been brought to the United States illegally after the abolishment of the slave trade in 1808. With congressional approval, the American Colonization Society in 1821 founded the colony of Liberia, which means Land of the Free, located south of Sierra Leone, as a permanent homeland for freed U.S. slaves.

Birth of a Movement

On February 4, in Black History...

In 1974 on February 4, France abolishes slavery. The nation will have a lukewarm commitment to abolition and will, under Napoleon, reestablish slavery in 1802 along with the reinstitution of the "Code noir", prohibiting blacks, mulattoes and other people of color from entering French colonial territory or intermarrying with whites.

In 1913, on February 4 Rosa Parks, mother of the modern day civil rights movement was born. On December 1, 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama, Parks, age 42, refused to obey bus driver James Blake's order that she give up her seat to make room for a white passenger. Her action was not the first of its kind.  But unlike these previous individual actions of civil disobedience, Parks' action sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott. 
Parks eventually received many honors ranging from the 1979 Spingarn Medal to the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Congressional Gold Medal and a posthumous statue in the United States Capitol's National Statuary Hall. Her death in 2005 was a major story in the United States' leading newspapers. She was granted the posthumous honor of lying in honor at the Capitol Rotunda. 
In her autobiography, My Story, Mrs. Parks remarks on that day on the bus:
“People always say that I didn't give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn't true. I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was forty-two. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in" in." 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosa_parks