A Bare Arm and a Gospel Truth

In May 1851, several ministers at the Women's Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio, argued that women were too delicate and intellectually inferior to deserve equal rights. Then Sojourner Truth stood up.

Born into slavery as Isabella Baumfree in Ulster County, New York, around 1797, Truth had been sold multiple times before she was a teenager. She had plowed fields and endured brutal labor alongside men. Standing before the convention, she bared her arm to the crowd and pointed to the strength forged by years of forced toil. She had borne children and fought in court to recover her young son Peter after he was illegally sold to a slaveholder in Alabama — one of the first Black women to win such a case. No one could call her weak. No one could call her less than.

Frances Gage, who presided over the convention, recalled how Truth's words left the room in stunned silence.

Paul wrote to the Galatians, "There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus" (3:28). What the Apostle declared as theology, Sojourner Truth demonstrated in the flesh. She stood in a room built on categories — race, sex, status — and dismantled them all with her witness. The Gospel does the same. It looks past every label the world assigns and sees what the Almighty has always seen: beloved children, equal in dignity and worth.