Jonathan Cohen's photos with the keyword: Sojourner Truth

Born into slavery in 1797, Isabella Baumfree, who later changed her name to Sojourner Truth, would become one of the most powerful advocates for human rights in the nineteenth century. Her early childhood was spent on a New York estate owned by a Dutch American named Colonel Johannes Hardenbergh. Like other slaves, she experienced the miseries of being sold and was cruelly beaten and mistreated. Around 1815 she fell in love with a fellow slave named Robert, but they were forced apart by Robert’s master. Isabella was instead forced to marry a slave named Thomas, with whom she had five children. In 1827, after her master failed to honor his promise to free her or to uphold the New York Anti-Slavery Law of 1827, Isabella ran away, or, as she later informed her master, "I did not run away, I walked away by daylight. …" After experiencing a religious conversion, Isabella became an itinerant preacher and in 1843 changed her name to Sojourner Truth. During this period she became involved in the growing antislavery movement, and by the 1850s she was involved in the woman’s rights movement as well. At the 1851 Women’s Rights Convention held in Akron, Ohio, Sojourner Truth delivered what is now recognized as one of the most famous abolitionist and women’s rights speeches in American history: "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? Look at me! Look at my arm! 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 the lash as well! 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 a woman?"

The church was built between 1804 to 1807 to the designs by noted American architect Asher Benjamin for the Third Baptist Church. Before the Back Bay neighbourhood was reclaimed from the water, the church was located at the edge of the Charles River which it used for its baptisms. In the years before the American Civil War, it was a stronghold of the anti-slavery movement, and was the site of notable speeches from anti-slavery activists Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Harriet Tubman, and Sojourner Truth. The Meeting House is part of the Boston Black Heritage Trail. The Baptist congregation sold the structure to the First African Methodist Episcopal Church in 1876. The building served as a Universalist Church of America church from 1949 to 1961, then Unitarian Universalist after consolidation from 1961 to 1978/1979. In 1979, it was sold to a private owner and was converted in the early 1980s by the architectural firm of John Sharrat Associates into four floors of offices with shops on the ground floor. The nineteenth-century altered sanctuary was relatively intact but much of the rest of the interior held little architectural significance in comparison with the exterior. The National Park Service then permitted extensive vertical and horizontal internal subdivision provided that the developer incorporate some existing ornamental features. The exterior was completely preserved.