Narrative of Sojourner Truth by Sojourner Truth
From Modern Library: The autobiography of a Black woman who defied nineteenth-century conventions to become a preacher, popular speaker, abolitionist, and women's rights activist. Sojourner Truth was an incredible, remarkable, epoch-defying woman who escaped from slavery and successfully sued for her son's freedom. She became a wildly successful orator and activist--a woman alive to the hypocrisies of her age, and unafraid to talk about them. Her autobiography, which she dictated, is an outstanding historical document. Truth's tale sheds a light on realities of slavery that are still rarely discussed: that she was a slave in upstate New York, not on a Southern plantation; that Dutch was her first language; that the circumstances of her slavery isolated her from a broader Black community; that her experience of religion was a racially integrated one, and became the means of her independence. Ultimately, The Narrative of Sojourner Truth is the story of a great American that reveals aspects of slavery and free Black life that are too often overlooked.