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Few individuals have been empowered to affect change for Africans of the Diaspora as Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman and Marcus Garvey. Each in their own ways used their God-given influence to fight slavery and its vestiges. In the annals of history, Truth, Tubman, Douglass and Garvey leave a legacy that is as relevant today as it was during their times on earth. In celebration of that history, which extends beyond the month of February, we profile them and honor them for their unique contributions.
Sojourner Truth
“Ain’t I a woman?”
Born Isabella Baumfree, Sojourner Truth was an anomaly: A tall (over six feet) woman weathered from years of labor as a slave yet one of the most stunning and striking, articulate women with an intellect that far exceeded and belied her circumstances and the expectations set upon her by her masters and the conventions of the times. Sojourner knew she was an anomaly and had endured the savage beating and mysterious disappearance of her husband to literally walk towards freedom; wandering until she found it.
With a spirit and drive to survive, on June 1, 1843 Isabella answered a call to become a traveling preacher and changed her name to appropriately, Sojourner Truth.
Imagine being the lone black face in an assembly of white women advocating women’s rights, as Sojourner did in 1854 in Akron, Ohio. Imagine being patronized and treated like a sideshow and you will imagine how Sojourner Truth felt as she delivered her most famous and poignant speech, “Ain’t I a Woman.”
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? ... I have plowed, and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me -- and ain't I a woman? … I have borne thirteen children and seen most all sold off to slavery and when I cried out with my mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me -- and ain’t I woman?”
Living up to her name, she would travel internationally meeting kings, presidents and other leaders in her travels to preach a gospel and Jesus of justice. Her final journey led her to walk back home to Michigan, to a daughter’s home, where she died on November 26, 1883.
Marcus Garvey
“Up! Up! You mighty race! You can accomplish what you will!”
In 1914, Marcus Garvey the eleventh child born of a family of humble means in St. Ann’s Bay, Jamaica, established the Universal Negro Improvement Association, a movement that inspired people of the global African Diaspora to embrace economic parity and empowerment. It was during the association’s convention held in Harlem, New York, that Garvey revealed his master plan to build an African nation-state.
Marcus Garvey was an unconventional man; some would say a free thinker, who dressed in military regalia – a symbol of his fight against the abysmal conditions black people lived in at the start of the last century. Thousands were attracted to and joined the UNIA, thus enabling Garvey to publish a newspaper, The Negro World, where he showcased the best efforts in Negro communities worldwide to move away from dependence on a system that was failing miserably.
Garvey toured the nation preaching the concept of Black Nationalism. He would ultimately establish 1,100 chapters of the UNIA globally in more than 40 countries. And as a result of this global success, Garvey launched The Black Star Shipping Line, an ambitious business effort he reckoned would fund his back to Africa movement.
Unfortunately, trusted aides betrayed him financially and the U. S. government tried and convicted him of mail fraud, which sent him to a federal prison for five years in Atlanta. In 1927, President Calvin Coolidge commuted Garvey’s sentence but deported him back to Jamaica.
After dabbling unsuccessfully in Jamaican politics, Garvey moved to England in 1935 and would die in West Kensington on June 10, 1940.
Frederick Douglass
“I would unite with anybody to do right and with nobody to do wrong.”
Called “The Lion of Anacostia,” Frederick Douglass was perhaps the most influential black leader of his time with the ability to bend the ears of presidents, kings and anyone else with the power to make decisions concerning the plight of slaves and even the emancipated.
Born in slavery in Talbot County, Maryland, the product of a union between a slave mother and white man, Douglass was taught how to read by an owner’s wife and in time he would give New Testament reading lessons to other slaves at the risk of his own life. After a series of unmerciful beatings, Douglass made two unsuccessful attempts to escape though in 1838 he would be successful using the identification papers of a free black seaman. Later, British sympathizers paid his owner for his “official” freedom.
Douglass was a lifelong advocate of education as a means of uplifting the race, black suffrage and even counseled Abraham Lincoln on the unfair treatment of black soldiers in the Civil War. And he was outspoken about the purpose of the War Between the States as a war to abolish slavery.
An ordained minister of the Gospel in the African Methodist Episcopal denomination, Douglass would publish a newspaper, would hold several government positions in the Anacostia/Washington, D.C. area as well as travel the world extensively as a public speaker. No stranger to controversy in 1884, two years after the death of his wife Anna Murray Douglass, Frederick married Helen Pitts, a white woman who was shunned by her family as he was shunned by his own children who felt the marriage insulted the memory of their longsuffering mother.
On February 20, 1895, Douglass died of a massive heart attack and is buried in Rochester, New York.
Harriet Tubman
“There was one of two things I had a right to, liberty or death; if I could not have one, I would have the other.”
Araminta Ross experienced a religious conversion that prompted her to change her name in honor of her deceased mother and a missing sister to Harriet, later taking the last name of her husband John Tubman. The woman called “Moses” would credit a relationship with Jesus and the gifts of dreams and visions in assisting her to not only leave the peculiar institution of slavery but leading thousands of slaves to freedom by following the North Star.
Making use of the Underground Railroad, Harriet escaped slavery and entered “the promised land” of Philadelphia working odd jobs, saving money and using her meager earnings to assist other slaves out of bondage. Frederick Douglass was one of her supporters and protectors as well as a lifelong admirer, who often spoke fondly of the diminutive devout Christian who packed a gun as a means of threatening slaves who wanted to return to slavery. She’d tell them, “Go or die.”
In her later years, post-emancipation, Tubman would support the cause of woman’s suffrage with Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. She became heavily involved with the African Methodist Episcopal church and even had a home for the aged named in her honor. Legend has it that she endured a brain operation with no anesthesia choosing instead to bite down on a bullet. On March 10, 1913, Tubman died from pneumonia in New York, a penniless, frail woman who left a rich legacy.
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