Back in Time Today
The fight against slavery in America was shaped by the extraordinary courage of Black women who refused to be silent. These powerful voices risked everything to speak truth to oppression during one of history’s darkest chapters. Their stories remind us that freedom’s path was paved by women whose names deserve to be remembered and celebrated.
1. Sojourner Truth: The Fearless Orator
Born enslaved as Isabella Baumfree, Sojourner Truth transformed personal suffering into a thunderous voice for justice. After escaping bondage in 1826 with her infant daughter, she reinvented herself as a traveling preacher and activist. Her iconic “Ain’t I a Woman?” speech challenged both racial and gender prejudices, making her a dual-threat in the fight for human rights. Standing nearly six feet tall, Truth commanded attention wherever she spoke. Beyond abolition, she recruited Black soldiers for the Union Army and later advocated for land redistribution to formerly enslaved people, understanding that true freedom required economic independence.
2. Harriet Tubman: The Underground Railroad Conductor
After twenty-nine years in slavery, Harriet Tubman’s escape to freedom was just the beginning of her extraordinary journey. Rather than enjoying her hard-won liberty in safety, she returned south approximately 13 times to rescue around 70 enslaved people—including her own family members. Armed with a pistol and unflinching resolve, Tubman navigated treacherous terrain under cover of darkness. “I never ran my train off the track and I never lost a passenger,” she proudly declared. During the Civil War, this five-foot-tall giant served as a Union spy, scout, and the first woman to lead an armed military raid.
3. Maria W. Stewart: America’s First Female Public Speaker
Maria Stewart shattered convention when she became the first American woman to address mixed-gender audiences on political issues. Her revolutionary path began after her husband’s death, when white executors stole her inheritance—igniting a fire for justice that would never extinguish. “Why sit ye here and die?” she challenged Black women in her speeches, urging them toward education and self-reliance. Her radical ideas about Black empowerment emerged decades before similar concepts became mainstream. Though public hostility forced her speaking career to last only three years (1831-1833), Stewart’s groundbreaking essays and speeches created a template for future Black female activists.
4. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper: The Poetic Voice of Freedom
“Make me a grave where’er you will, in a lowly plain or a lofty hill… But not in a land where men are slaves.” These powerful words from Harper’s poem “Bury Me in a Free Land” captured her passionate commitment to abolition. Born free in Baltimore, this literary prodigy published her first book of poetry at age 20. Harper’s words flowed across newspaper pages and lecture halls, reaching hearts that political speeches couldn’t touch. Her 1859 novel “The Two Offers” marked the first published by an African American woman. After the Civil War, Harper traveled through the South, documenting the struggles of formerly enslaved people while advocating for women’s suffrage.
5. Sarah Parker Remond: The International Ambassador
Refusing to sit in segregated theater seating at age 16, Sarah Parker Remond demonstrated the boldness that would define her life’s work. Born into a prosperous free Black family in Massachusetts, she transformed privilege into purpose by carrying America’s moral failures to international audiences. European crowds fell silent as this eloquent speaker described slavery’s horrors in perfect English—sometimes peppered with fluent Italian or French. Her overseas advocacy helped prevent Britain from supporting the Confederacy during the Civil War. After abolition, Remond remained in Europe, earning a medical degree in Florence, Italy, where she practiced as a physician until her death in 1894.
6. Charlotte Forten Grimké: The Educational Pioneer
When Union forces captured South Carolina’s Sea Islands in 1861, Charlotte Forten volunteered for a dangerous mission: teaching newly freed people in Confederate territory. As the first northern Black teacher to join this effort, she documented her experiences in journals that provide rare firsthand accounts of wartime emancipation. Unlike white teachers who often condescended to their students, Forten approached her work with cultural understanding and genuine respect. “They are eager to learn,” she wrote, marveling at students who mastered reading despite having been legally forbidden from literacy. A published poet and essayist, she later married Francis Grimké, creating a powerhouse civil rights partnership that lasted decades.
7. Ellen Craft: The Masterful Escape Artist
With fair skin inherited from her enslaver father, Ellen Craft orchestrated one of history’s most audacious freedom journeys. Disguised as a wealthy white male planter with her arm in a sling to avoid signing documents (she couldn’t write), Ellen traveled in first-class train compartments while her husband William posed as her servant. Their 1,000-mile escape from Georgia to Philadelphia in December 1848 captivated the nation. When slave hunters later tracked them to Boston, the couple fled to England, where they lived for nearly two decades. After the Civil War, they returned to Georgia and established a farm with a school for formerly enslaved children, turning their freedom into opportunity for others.