A Voice That Would Not Be Denied

On May 29, 1851, a tall, weathered woman rose from the pews of the Old Stone Church in Akron, Ohio. The Women's Rights Convention had drawn clergy and skeptics alike, many arguing that women were too delicate for equal standing. Into that tension stepped Sojourner Truth — formerly enslaved, unable to read or write, yet possessing a voice that silenced the room.

She stood before the crowd and spoke from the marrow of her own life. She had plowed fields. She had borne thirteen children and watched most of them sold away into slavery. She had endured the lash and the auction block. And yet some in that room doubted whether she — whether any woman — deserved full dignity. Truth bared her arm, showing muscles hardened by decades of forced labor, and asked the assembly to reconcile what they saw with what they claimed to believe.

Frances Gage, who presided over the convention, later recalled that Truth's words cut through every objection like a blade through silk.

Genesis 1:27 declares that God created humanity — male and female — in His own image. Not some of humanity. Not the privileged or the powerful. Every person who draws breath carries the fingerprint of the Almighty. Sojourner Truth did not need a seminary degree to understand this. She knew it in her bones: the Imago Dei is not earned. It is bestowed by the Creator Himself, and no law, no lash, no human system can strip it away.

When we diminish anyone's dignity, we deface the image of God.