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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You're Dead to Me · Sojourner Truth: American abolitionist, suffragist, preacher · 28 Feb 2025 podcast

It also is notable because it depended on inaccurate, heavily racist stereotypes. Yeah, it really gains notoriety and really contributes to a particular narrative of Truth that is less sophisticated than the real person. But at the same time, Stowe is hugely credited with furthering Truth's celebrity, right? So this article makes her hugely popular.

She's able, from the money sold on the book, to buy her own home, actually. So in addition to the Harriet Beecher Stowe endorsement, the fact that it only cost 25 cents, which apparently at that time, I know nothing is affordable. So the book is flying off the shelves. Right. And allowing her to make this money.

Yes. Yes. So she said, you know, in saying this, she's really trying to get him to think that only when God is dead will violence be the answer. So she at the time is very, you know, against violence. She believes that, you know, prayer, faith, faithfulness to God's word is what's going to see African-Americans and slave people through this moment.

And so it's this, again, another example of this ideological tension between these two people.

So she has a lot of audiences, but actually the media is very uneven about its coverage of her. So oftentimes she's not mentioned by name in the papers. And so if we're looking at it from the historical record, it's very hard to tell. Yet we also have narratives of people speaking about what a great orator she is.

And so it's very clear that whenever she is speaking, that she's really, that the audience is raptured by her. She's known for, she sings to them. She has this powerful speaking quality. And she's also really funny and apparently very sarcastic. And so and she's able to really infuse this wit and this humor into her speaking engagements where she's talking about these issues, right?

Like, you know, slavery, abolition, women's inequality, right? Very serious things. But she's able to do so in a way that really invites audiences in.

I will also say that I gave this speech as a kid on the news, on the morning news at 6 a.m. So it's very dear to me, but it is a complicated history. So Truth gave this speech, or is purported to have given this speech, at the Ohio Women's Rights Convention that was held in Akron in May 1851.

And in this speech, we do know that Truth spoke about how she could do as much physical labor as a man, about how Jesus was the Son of God and of a woman, argued very humorously that women were valued in the eyes of God in a way that men were not. She says she's plowed and planted and gathered into barns and no man could heed me. And aren't I a woman?

So that's the part of the text that's often attributed to her. The article was written by an organizer of this convention called Frances Dana Gage. It is believed that she writes this directly in response to Stowe's more stereotypical and damaging kind of depiction of truth in that Libyan civil movement.

And so Gage here is making a specific point about the intersection of a kind of women's ideology or political orientation in that of a kind of black pride or kind of black ideology. Right. She's trying to bring these things together that you can be both black and woman. She does so in adopting a dialect that was not truth.

Much of the kind of practice of the time for particularly writers who are trying to elevate the abolitionist cause. is that they're translating the kind of oratory of enslaved or formerly enslaved people into broken dialect. And it's offensive, right? Particularly to our kind of modern ear. It's also inaccurate. That's not how Truth spoke. We've made it clear today, right?

She was of Dutch heritage, right? She had a Dutch accent and spoke like many people in her region. In one line, then that little man in black dar, he say woman can't have as much right as man. That would not have been the speech.

Yeah, so she becomes a huge figure in terms of trying to galvanize support amongst black Americans, particularly to the union cause. And so she works very hard to recruit black men into the union army. Her grandson, right, also enlists. And so that's a huge moment. And she speaks with President Abraham Lincoln online. about what is to come for Black Americans.

And she comes to really support the war. She sees it as necessary, as religiously, morally necessary for the country. And she becomes really interested in what's going to happen for people after the war. But in terms of her work for the Union Army in particular, she's collecting food for troops. She's using her photographs to bring awareness to the war cause.

and really trying to popularize the notion that this is an important endeavor for black Americans to be engaged in.

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.

Yes and no. So she becomes really part of these circles, right? 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, you know, 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, and really has what, you know, we will know to be really powerful interlocutors.

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