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SOJOURNER TRUTH
(1797-1883)
AIN'T I A WOMAN?t
That man over there say
a woman needs to be helped into carriages
and lifted over ditches
and to have the best place everywhere.
Nobody ever helped me into carriages
or over mud puddles
or gives me a best place . . .
And ain't I a woman?
Look at me
Look at my arm!
I have plowed and planted
and gathered into barns
and no man could head me . . .
And ain't I a woman?
I could work as much
and eat as much as a man ?
when I could get to it?
and bear the la^h as well
and ainU4 a woman?
I have born 13 children
and seen most all sold into slavery
and when I cried out a mother's grief
none but Jesus heard me . . .
and ain't 4 a woman?
that little man in black there say
a can't have as much rights as a man
cause Christ wasn't a woman
Where did your Christ come from?
From God and a woman!
Man had nothing to do with him!
If the first woman God ever made
was strong enough to turn the world
upside down, all alone
together women ought to be able to turn it
rightside up again.
tThere is no exact copy of this speech given at the Women's Rights Convention in
Akron, Ohio in 1 852 The speech has been adapted to the poetic format by Erlene
Stetson from the copy found in Sojourner, God's Faithful Pilgrim by Arthur Huff
Fauset (Chapel Hill University of North Carolina Press, 1938).
A LITANY AT ATLANTA
Done at Atlanta,
in the Day of Death, 1906
By William Edward Burghardt DuBois
O Silent God, Thou whose voice afar i. , mist and mystery hath left
our ears an-hungered in these fearful days
Hear us, good Lord!
Listen to us, Thy children: our faces dark with doubt are made a
mockery in Thy sanctuary. With uplifted hands we front Thy
heaven, O God crying:
We beseech Thee to hear us, good Lord!
We are not better than our fellows, Lord, we are but weak and
human men. When our devils do deviltry, curse Thou the doer and
the deed: curse them as we curse them, do to them all and more
than ever they have done to innocence and weakness, to woman
hood and home.
Have mercy upon us, miserable sinners!
Andyet whose ts the deeper guitt? Who made these devils? Who
nursed them in crime and fed them on injustice? Who ravished and
debauched their mothers and their grandmothers? Who bought
and sold their crime, and waxed fat and rich on public iniquity?
Thou knowest, good God !
Is this Thy Justice, O Father, that guile be easier than innocence,
and the innocent crucified for the guilt of the untouched guilty?
Justice r O Judge of men!
Wherefore do we pray? Is not the God of the fathers dead? Have
not seers seen in Heaven's halls Thine hearsed and lifeless form
stark amidst the black and rolling smoke of sun, where all along
bow bitter forms of endless dead?
Awake, Thou that steepest!
Thou are not dead, but flown afar, up hills of endless light, thru
blazing corridors of suns, where worlds do swing of good and
gentle men, of women strong and free ? far from the cozenage,
black hypocrisy and chaste prostitution of this shameful speck of
dust!
Turn again, O Lord, leave us not to perish in our sin!
From lust of body and lust of blood
Great God deliver us!
From lust of power and lust of gold,
Great God, deliver us!
From the leagued lying oldespot and of brute,
Great God, deliver us!
A city lay in travail, Qod our Lora, and from her loins sprang twin
Murder and Black Hate. Red was the midnight; clang, crack and
cry of death and fury filled the air and trembled underneath the
stars when church spires pointed silently to Thee. And all this was
to sate the greed of greedy men who hide behind the veil of
vengeance!
Bend us Thine ear, O Lord!
In the pale, still morning we look upon the dead. We stopped our
earsand held our leaping hands, but they ? did they not wag their
heads and leer and cry with bloody jaws: Cease from Crime! The
word was mockery, for thus they train a hundred crimes while we
do cure one. '
Turn again our captivity, O Lord!
Behold this maimed and broken thing; daar Onri U was an hum
ble black man who toiled and sweat to save a bit from the pittance
paid him. They told him: Work and Rise. He worked. Did this man
sin? Nay, but some one told how some one said another did ? one
whom he had never seen nor known. Yet for that man's crime, this
man lieth maimed and murdered, his wife naked to shame, his
children, to poverty and evil.
Hear us, O Heavenly Father!
? Doth not this justice of hell slink in Thy nostrils, O God? How
long shall the mounting flood of innocent blood roar in Thineears
and pound in our hearts for vengeance? Pile the pale frenzy of
blood-crazed brutes who do such deeds high on Thine altar, Je
hovah Jireh, and burn it in hell forever and forever!
Forgive us, good Lord; we know not what we say!
Bewildered weare, and passion-tost, mad with the madness of a
mobbed and mocked and murdered people; straining at the arm
posts of Thy Throne, we raise our shackled hands and charge
Thee, God, by the bones of our stolen fathers, by the tears of our
dead mothers, by the very blood of Thy crucified Christ: What
meaneth this? Tell us the Plan; give us the Sign!
Keep not Thou silence, O God!