Sojourner Truth Speech at Akron Women's Rights Convention Exposes Intersection of Racism and Sexism

On May 29, 1851, Sojourner Truth delivered a landmark speech at the Women’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio, becoming the only woman who spoke at the convention who had ever been held in slavery. Born into slavery in Ulster County, New York around 1797, Truth had experienced a religious conversion and changed her name from Isabella in 1843, becoming an itinerant preacher. Her speech made powerful arguments about women’s physical and intellectual capacities while using religious reasoning to support equal rights. The speech demonstrated how democratic exclusion operated along intersecting lines of race and gender, challenging both the women’s rights movement and broader society to confront the compound oppression faced by Black women. Her presence at the convention revealed tensions within the suffrage movement that would later fracture the alliance between women’s rights activists and abolitionists.

The speech exists in two significantly different versions, revealing how historical narratives can be manipulated even in service of progressive causes. The first transcription was published on June 21, 1851 in the Anti-Slavery Bugle by Marius Robinson, an abolitionist newspaper editor who served as the convention’s recording secretary and was a friend of Truth’s. Historical evidence suggests they reviewed his transcription before publication. However, the version titled “Ain’t I a Woman?” published in 1863 by suffragist Frances Dana Gage became more widely circulated despite being far less accurate. Gage’s version falsely attributed a southern slave dialect to Truth, who actually spoke Dutch until age nine and lived her entire enslaved life in New York, never in the South. This historical distortion, while perhaps well-intentioned, reflected how even progressive movements could appropriate and distort Black women’s voices to serve their own narratives.

Truth’s speech exposed the fundamental hypocrisy of democratic institutions that claimed universal principles while systematically excluding people based on both race and gender. Her argument that she deserved the same rights as men despite being a woman, and the same rights as white women despite being Black, challenged the hierarchical logic underlying institutional power structures. The speech foreshadowed conflicts that would erupt in 1869 when white suffrage leaders like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony deployed racist rhetoric opposing the 15th Amendment’s extension of voting rights to Black men while excluding women. Truth’s intervention demonstrated how corporate and political interests exploited divisions among oppressed groups to maintain their power, a strategy that would repeatedly undermine movements for democratic expansion. Her speech remains a landmark in recognizing intersectional oppression and challenging movements to confront their own complicity in systems of exclusion.