Dr. Michelle Chresfield
speaker
151 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard May 2025
Dr. Michelle Chresfield’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Yeah, there are conflicting accounts here. Yeah, thank you very much for that. So Truth would describe Lincoln as amenable and someone who greeted her as an equal. But she would attend this meeting with her friend and colleague, Lucy Coleman, who would later describe Lincoln as tense when he met Truth. And Coleman alleges that Lincoln actually addresses her truth as he would a washerwoman.
And so as actually not recognizing Truth's stature and importance there.
Yes and no. So she becomes really part of these circles. So she is with leading women's rights and suffrage figures. So in 1872, she joined Susan B. Anthony in trying to vote in a presidential election. She's turned away. She's touring New York State. And by this time, in 1870, she's in her 70s. And she's lecturing daily, sometimes twice a day. She participates in
in efforts to try to get land for black Americans, even though that's never really kind of supported by Congress. So she's really has and is developing grand political ambitions, right, well into her later years.
So she has various bouts of illness. She tries to travel locally. By this time, she's in Battle Creek, Michigan. So she's relocated again. And she really finds refuge and community in Michigan. It's a place that she really comes to love. But, you know, she's very sick. And during this time, she continues, though, to give speeches.
She continues to draw audiences, and her speeches are printed very widely. But unfortunately, she dies on 26th of November, 1883, at home. at around the age of 86. And she is eulogized by her many colleagues, including Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass. So her long frenemy will come back and speak of her upon her passing. Oh, that's nice.
So, you know, Sojourner Truth, she is what we know to be this really great figure. But a lot of her life exists, you know, at the edge of myth and reality. There's so much about her that we can't know, we won't ever know. Like what she really sounded like, right? A lot of that comes from the kind of narrations of others.
And because she is someone so kind of shrouded in myth, I think it's important for us to really sit with what she did and what we can know based on what she did. We know that she is a woman who was deeply religious, who stepped out on faith to self-emancipate herself. who moved about in these various kind of avenues to live the life that she wanted for herself as a free person.
And we know that she really tried to thread this needle between a faithfulness to her race as a black woman, but also to her gender, right, as a woman who wanted to seek equality. And this is not an easy balance to contend with at the moment at which she's doing it, right? We have examples today of how hard that is for some people.
And so there's so much about what she said that we'll never know for sure. But we know that she worked tirelessly on behalf of black people, on behalf of women to improve their lives. And so I think if we know that, we know as much truth that is important and possible to know.
You're Dead to Me · Sojourner Truth: American abolitionist, suffragist, preacher · 28 Feb 2025
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Thank you for having me. I'm so happy to be back. The gang is back together.
That is correct. So the woman that we will come to know as Sojourner was actually born Isabella Bonfrey. And while there is no exact date for her birth, we know that she was born around 1797 in Ulster County, New York, which is a rural area about two hours north of New York City.
Isabella was the youngest of 10 or 12 children born to the enslaved couple James and Elizabeth, and she was nicknamed Belle. And the young bell was enslaved on a northern farm. Unlike the southern plantations that pervade historical lore, northern slavery was much more small scale. Most people owned one or two enslaved people who labored on small scale farming or domestic work.
So although slavery was relatively small and small in this area, northern slavery in New York State, slavery in particular, where Isabella will be held, was very central to the international slave trade. So her early life, she's on a farm, she's owned by a family who owns about six or seven people, which makes that family very wealthy and notable for the time.
So this is like the milieu in which, you know, she begins her life.
Actually, Isabella's birth date is very significant because it's the year that the cotton gin is invented. And it's the cotton gin that really allows Southern slavery to take the shape that it does, because it allows this kind of mass cultivation of cotton, which will revolutionize the industry and require much more human labor to cultivate those crops.
Northern slavery, by comparison, you do have in the early years of the 1600s, people are definitely growing crops. But by the time that Isabella is born, it's very much shifted to where it's much more skilled labor, where you might see enslaved labor being deployed in homes,
You see at the time that she's born a real kind of shift, right, in the kind of power of slavery in the United States, but also the ways in which slavery will become to look very different between the two regions.
So when the colonel was alive, the parents were allowed to basically farm on a small scale in conditions that we would liken to sharecropping, which actually doesn't really take formation until later. But essentially, Elizabeth and James live on their own in a cottage where they farm a small tract of land that was rented from the Hardenbergs.
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