Abolitionists

Abolitionists

Strategies of Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, and John Brown

Abolitionist Movement was a reform movement during the 18th and 19th centuries. Often called the antislavery movement, it sought to end the enslavement of Africans and people of African descent in Europe, the Americas, and Africa itself. It also aimed to end the Atlantic slave trade carried out in the Atlantic Ocean between Africa, Europe, and the Americas. Many people participated in trying to end slavery. These people became known as the abolitionists. The three well-known abolitionists are Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, and John Brown.

Sojourner Truth (1797-1883), born into slavery as Isabella, was an American abolitionist and an advocate of women's rights. She joined the abolitionist movement and became a travelling preacher. She took her new name-Sojourner Truth-in 1843 and began preaching along the eastern seaboard. Her strategy consisted of walking through Long Island and Connecticut, speaking to people about her life and her relationship with God. She was a powerful speaker and singer. When she rose to speak, wrote one observer, "her commanding figure and dignified manner hushed every trifler to silence." Audiences were "melted into tears by her touching stories". She traveled and spoke widely.

Encountering the women's rights movement in 1850, Truth added its causes to hers. She is particularly remembered for the famous "Ain't I a Woman?" speech she gave at the woman's rights convention in 1851. Although Truth never learned to read or write, she dictated her memoirs to Olive Gilbert and they were published in 1850s as The Narrative of Sojourner Truth: A Northern Slave. This book, and her presence as a speaker, made her a sought-after figure on the anti-slavery woman's rights lecture circuit.

Harriet Tubman was closely associated with Abolitionist John Brown and was well acquainted with other abolitionists, including Frederick Douglas, Jermain Loguen, and Gerrit Smith. After freeing herself from slavery, Tubman worked at various activities to save to finance her activities as a Conductor of the Underground Railroad. She is believed to have conducted approximately 300 persons to freedom in the North. The tales of her exploits reveal her highly spiritual nature, as well as a grim determination to protect her charges and those who aided t...

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... others to do what she needed them to do. Her subjects listed to what she had to say and were encouraged enough by her words not to give up and to continue their journey to freedom.

As a result of the abolitionist movement, the institution of slavery ceased to exist in Europe and the Americas by 1888, although it was not completely legally abolished in Africa until the first quarter of the 20th century. While the abolitionist movement's greatest achievement was certainly the liberation of millions of black people from servitude, it also reflected the triumph of modern ideas of freedom and human rights over older social forms based on privileged elites and social stratification.

Bibliography:

Baines, Rae. Harriet Tubman-The Road to Freedom. New Jersey: Troll Asssociates,

1982.

Bernard, Jacqueline. Journey Toward Freedom-The Story of Sojourner Truth. New

York: Norton Publishers, 1967.

Ripley, Peter C. The Black Abolitionist Papers. Chapel Hill: University of North

Carolina Press, 1985.

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