A White Writer Put Four Words in Her Mouth 12 Years Later: Sojourner Truth

Everyone knows four words: "Ain't I a woman?" We're told Sojourner Truth thundered them in 1851, in a room full of people who wanted her to sit down. There's just one problem — she never said them. This is the true story of the woman behind the myth: a Dutch-speaking girl born into slavery in New York, sold with a flock of sheep, who renamed herself, won her son back from an Alabama slaveholder in court, and out-argued a room full of men with nothing but her own two arms and a single sentence — "I am a woman's rights." It's the story of how a white writer rewrote her voice twelve years later, why the real speech is stronger than the legend, and how a woman who could not read became one of the most media-savvy people of the 19th century: she copyrighted her own image and sold it with the line "I sell the shadow to support the substance." Her whole life is a warning we still need: the world will always prefer the easy version of you. Make sure you know which one is the shadow and which one is the substance. ⏱️ CHAPTERS 0:00 The Words She Never Said 1:35 The Girl Called Isabella 3:57 Everything They Could Take 6:22 The Woman Who Beat Them in Court 8:39 Choosing Her Own Name 10:32 What She Really Said in Akron 13:01 The Rewrite 15:24 Why the Real One Matters More 17:26 I Sell the Shadow to Support the Substance 20:59 The Substance 🎧 Also available as a podcast on Spotify. 🔔 Subscribe for more stories of women who refused to sit down — and refused to be rewritten. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ Music: "Meditation Impromptu 01" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License https://creativecommons.org/licenses/... Images: Public Domain (Library of Congress, The Met, NMAAHC, Wikimedia Commons). ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ #SojournerTruth #BlackHistory #WomensHistory #AintIAWoman #Abolitionist #HERspirational