This first document is a telegram from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to the Jackie Robinson Testimonial Dinner acknowledging that he was not going to be able to attend. The reason being he was going back to Albany, GA. The telegram was sent to Reverend Wyatt Walker, who was his strategist for most of the civil rights-era movements and trying to strategize about the nonviolent approach to the civil disobedience strategy they were putting together.

King could not attend this dinner. In fact, King was one of the coordinators of the dinner. He was helping a number of people acknowledge the significance of Jackie Robinson's contribution. The fact that he was being inducted into Baseball's Hall of Fame three days later was important because, again, Robinson was the first African American to play in the major leagues in the modern era. Those that played—the last group of African Americans that played played in the 1880s; so Robinson becoming the first integrated baseball [player] in 1947 was significant. Reason being, he was the first to demonstrate this idea of integration in a public way. His baseball play on the baseball field was a demonstration of the ability of African Americans to persevere. The things that he was able to achieve, the things that he endured made him an example for people like Dr. King; it was an example for young men like an Arthur Ashe. So this Testimonial Dinner was to acknowledge his accomplishments.

Just in thinking about this telegram [from] King, the language used—and again this is a telegram so you can't put everything you want in there, it has to be short and concise. King writes:

Warmest heartfelt greetings to all of you assembled on this auspicious occasion. An important turn of events in Albany, GA, made it imperative for me to return here immediately. Had looked forward with great anticipation to being with you tonight. Can think of nothing I regret more than having to miss this opportunity to personally join with you in this testimonial to one of the truly great men of our nation. —Martin Luther King Jr.

So in this document you have someone like King, and even in '62, he is still elevated as being this significant individual, that he would acknowledge Jackie Robinson as being this really great man. And so would I ask my students, or I would ask even myself, what qualities did Jackie Robinson demonstrate that King thought were so important to identify him as this great man?

I think in our nation when we [think] about great men we think about our Presidents. So to have Robinson at the top of that pile of men or that mountain of individuals is something to imagine. In my mind, what qualities, what characteristics does someone like a "Robinson" have that would call for his identification as a great man?

I would say that because of Robinson's perseverance, because of the strength of character he demonstrated when he was playing baseball, when he was receiving the catcalls, when he was being taunted by opposing pitchers or managers at the dugouts. He demonstrated the kind of character that King would also take advantage of or use in his own nonviolent civil disobedience or his way in which he demonstrated his own character. And so Robinson became an example for children, for adults; he was in some ways—not even I would call him the poster child, but he was the example that a number of African Americans looked to as they themselves sought to—not integrate society—but to be recognized as human beings and as citizens of the United States.

Even with baseball, I would say that it's less about sports, and it's more about demonstrating one's…not autonomy, but one's humanity. So, the fact that you have it in an arena where people are watching makes it important because there are those who are there to validate what you're doing. So it's not necessarily the fact that Robinson could hit a home run, it's the fact that he's able to compete with white men and had the opportunity to do so. So it's less about the sport, it's more about what it says about his abilities as a human being; and therefore he becomes a metaphor for other African Americans or other minorities or other people who are marginalized. So it becomes a performance.

It's July 20, 1962. So King wrote this keynote address to present Jackie Robinson to these 800-plus people at the Waldorf Astoria on the occasion of him being inducted into the Hall of Fame. It's a very interesting address in that he accounts for the changes taking place in the nation, his push in Albany, GA, to integrate the society, and how he is serious about the changes that need to take place. This is something that he mentions in the first few pages of the document. What I find really important about the document is the discussion about Jackie Robinson's mother. And this is research that people really have neglected as it relates to how does Robinson learn about integrating society, what examples does he have? So the idea that King himself acknowledges Mallie Robinson, Jackie Robinson's mother, her contribution, is something I think is really important. That's an important part of this document.

This is the letter here, it says:

It seems particularly fitting that the latest battle in the holy war for freedom has its locale in the state of Georgia. Jackie Robinson was born in that state and the indomitable spirit which is characteristic of heroic Negro women of the South is the same stripe of courage and integrity which marks Mallie Robinson, Jackie's mother, who sits with us tonight. We are certain that the mother of our guest of honor is content in the realization that the vision she cherished was not nursed in vain. It was the vision of a woman, who, without help, had to bring a family out of the bleak shadows of the sharecropper's life into the sunlight of new opportunity in the Far West. This is Jackie Robinson's night, but he, himself, would be the first to tell you that you cannot declare a night in his honor without also honoring the two women who have been his inspiration and his strength: Mallie Robinson, his wonderful God-fearing mother, and Rachel Robinson, his wife, companion, his solace and full partner in moments of despair as well as moments of triumph.

This is such a powerful testimony to him not doing it on his own, but Robinson being groomed within the context of the early 20th century by his mother, who is sharing this formula to—not just being successful, but for identifying yourself as being a human being, deserving of the rights of full citizenship. Which I think is amazing.

This is just one part of this—of these documents that I would even have students do more research on. In what way was she an inspiration? How did she demonstrate this way in which to win people over? Is it through her kindness? Did she demonstrate on the block—how you convince people of your humanity? What was her formula, what was her technique? That brings up another question too—the role of women within black communities. It's this—new history is uncovering the fact that black women represented these "outsiders within." They were the domestics who worked in white communities who traversed those lines of discrimination and brought back information to their families.

So similar to Jackie Robinson and his mother Mallie, you have Ralph Ellison's mother, who worked as a domestic who brought information from outside of the community into the community. So these mothers, these women, these contributors to this community were really bringing much more to the community besides their ability to earn an income. They were bringing this knowledge that could, and did, inspire the next generation to continue to fight for their rights. And Robinson is just one example. I would say that Joe Louis has the same thing in the 1920s when his family moves to Detroit, along with Jesse Owens, the same thing in Cleveland. These are the people we've identified as being significant because of their accomplishments. What about those that we do not know about that have also contributed greatly to increasing the opportunities for not just African Americans, but for all people who've been marginalized?

The third document is the actual seating list for the Hall of Fame dinner. It's taking place on July the 20th, 1962, at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York. At the head table you have people like, for instance, Whitney Young, who was a civil rights activist. You have—if you look down the list, you have the entire Robinson family and friends; you have the heavyweight champion Floyd Patterson, who's there with family and friends; you have of course Duke Ellington, who is the jazz—jazz royalty, if you will. And then you can go on down the list and find different names that maybe jump out. But I guess what's most important about this is the range of people who are in attendance. It's not just political. There are people who support the idea of a movement; not just a civil rights movement, but this human rights movement. This idea that here is someone who we've come to honor, of what he's not only been able to achieve as a baseball player—that's only one aspect of his life—but he has done for American people, for oppressed people. He's demonstrated that one person can make a difference. In doing that, they're there to honor him for that.

He grew up in a neighborhood that was integrated by his family, but he was still ostracized and tormented because he was black. He used his athletic ability that he developed as a child to overcome those differences. The fact that he was able to become such a wonderful athlete at UCLA, that's only one thing. But he used that; he channeled his anger and his frustration into—in baseball into base hits, into touchdowns, into home runs. He was able to take something that was a day-to-day kind of experience [with] racism and being separate from society and use it to his advantage. He refused to participate in the Jim Crow society that the black players in the Negro leagues were accustomed to. He refused to eat out of the paper bags that were handed to them with sandwiches; he said, "If we're going to buy your gas, we're going to be able to use your restaurant. And we're going to use your restroom if we need to." And so he challenged the status quo, and some people didn't like that because they felt that he thought he was better than them, when in fact he was demonstrating what his mother had demonstrated to him: that you're a human being [and] you have the right to be treated as such.

What I do when I'm teaching about certain time periods in history—or at least events—we'll say events—what I have my students do is to deconstruct the event. Give me some of the major things that occurred that led to that event unfolding. Let's name them. And let's see, what are some of the unintended consequences that came out of these different combinations of factors, because those things were not anticipated.

The fact that Robinson's mother chose to move to California as opposed to Detroit, New York, Cleveland, Kansas City, that gave him a different opportunity that could not be predetermined. No one could imagine the fact that she brought him up in an integrated neighborhood where she herself was the example was going to be the "x factor" as relates to Jackie Robinson in some ways becoming that person. But these other factors had to also play out. He had to go to UCLA, he had to play on integrated teams at Pasadena Junior College, he had to meet Joe Louis at Fort Riley, and Joe Louis had to become heavyweight champion and garner the love of a nation with his fights with Schmeling in 1938. So, all these other things we couldn't anticipate—things had to unfold the way they did and people had to anticipate opportunity and take advantage of when it came. But there is no way we could have ever have guessed Jackie Robinson would become the person he was, the person we still admire.

It's hard for me in some ways to teach history in this kind of chronological kind of fashion. By date it may work that way, hour-by-hour, but there are things that precede that moment that kind of set up the opportunity for something to unfold differently than you've maybe anticipated. What I like to do is draw a timeline—yes, these things happened, this is the date, but what happened over here or over here that primed us to take advantage of the moment when it arises, when it arose. That's kind of the way in which I approach these different historical moments.

With Robinson, no one really knows he was in a little gang when he was a kid, the Pepper Street Gang. Some of the information that I've read says that he was the leader of this little gang. They weren't a violent gang—they stole apples, they ran through cherry orchards and pulled cherries off of trees, things of that nature. But one person in his neighborhood said, "You're going down the wrong road, young man." And that one person probably made a big difference in his life. So, it really matters when we think about how these things unfold, it matters who the people are in our lives. It could be that one thing that changes everything. Robinson has enough people in his life helping him make decisions, so that when he has to make choices on his own, he's making them within the context of moving forward. Even though there are challenges and obstacles that will arise.

There's not one way in which to lead people, there are multiple ways to freedom. And I think that both of these individuals [Jackie Robinson and Martin Luther King Jr.] juxtapose against one another. They demonstrate that. One of course does it in baseball—but it's not really about baseball—and one of course does it in marching, but it's not about marching. They're these demonstrations of one's ability to claim your humanity, your manhood, and your citizenship. You just happen to have an audience watching you.

I think Jackie Robinson is underappreciated for his civil rights, not just record, but his significance. And when we think about this idea of integrating baseball we've reduced it just to that, just to baseball. When in fact he is such a huge figure, and the ability of an individual to stand up not only for what he believes in, but for what he believes other people want him to believe in—or to represent. Robinson himself is initiating a lot of these integration [and] these conversations about integration through his athletic competition; but what he's doing more than anything else, he's challenging his right to speak up as a human being and as an American citizen. So, when you have Dr. King and Jackie Robinson coming together, and you put those two individuals in the same room, who's learning from who? Is King learning about, not necessarily civil disobedience, but how to be patience? Is he learning more compassion? Is he learning the techniques? Because Robinson got it from the best of them when he was playing baseball; he received the death threats, which King would receive later on in his life. So, at what point can we say that they both learned from one another? And Robinson, in fact, maybe inspired even more because he knew the way he had gone through it, he had run the gauntlet.

The source is a biography of Harriet Tubman and it was written by Sarah Hopkins Bradford, who knew Tubman's family from Auburn, NY, and knew Tubman herself. [She] wrote the story of Tubman's life to try to raise money in Tubman's older age when she was quite poor. It gives us a very close account of Harriet Tubman's life, which is valuable in part because Tubman wasn't literate—she didn't read or write English. So the fact that she actually sat down with Sarah Bradford and told her story to Bradford means we can come very close to what it was that Harriet Tubman experienced.

Bradford ended up writing two different versions of this biography. The first one was written in 1868, published in 1869, and it was written really for a clearly intended purpose. Harriet Tubman was poor, she was struggling to get a pension from the U.S. government for her work during the Civil War as a nurse and also as a spy and she hadn't been successful. So she really needed money just to live on and to take care of her household. Her community members in Auburn, NY, thought that telling her life story could be a way to earn money for her. This creates a limitation on the source—it was written so that it would get an audience who would pay money to hear the story. That means that there could be some aspects of the story of Tubman's life that would be told for this audience and some that could be held back because the audience might not want to pay to hear about it.

Harriet Tubman is a mythic figure in African American history, African American women’s history—American women's history—and American history. She has an incredible life story. I think that has been a wonderful thing, but also it has been limiting because she has become a larger-than-life almost stereotype in the ways that we think about the history of slavery. She's often talked about during Black History Month, for example, but only with a sentence or two about her life. Part of the challenge in studying Harriet Tubman's life is to get beyond this picture of a super-human person who had incredible strength and did all of these things that seem impossible. It's very difficult to get at the sense that Harriet Tubman was a real person, she was born a slave on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, she had a very, very difficult childhood. She was hired out by her master at a very young age. When she was only five, she was sent to work for another family and she had charge of an infant—a five year old was a babysitter for an infant. She was expected to know how to care for this child and keep it quiet through the night, and of course she couldn't. So she would be whipped by her mistress for not taking proper care of this baby. Tubman was a real person and she suffered real trials, real hardships, under slavery. I think that that aspect of her life gets covered over when we think of her as the woman who went back to the South to save scores of slaves.

Well, she was born around 1820—it's not exactly clear when she was born because records about slaves are often limited—and when she was a young woman she decided to escape. She had already lost sisters who had been sold, and she thought that her best chance at having any kind of future was to secure her own freedom. She organized her own escape in 1849, she made it to Philadelphia, and she then spent the next decade dedicating her life to freeing other people who were enslaved: her family, other people she knew, and then also strangers. It's mind-blowing to think about the incredible dedication that Harriet Tubman had to liberty. When she wasn't going on trips to the South to free people, she was working in the North to earn money to pay for her trips. She did this for about 10 years. Around 1858 she went into maybe "semi-retirement" and she wasn't going back into the South herself, but she was using her home in New York as a place where fugitives who were continuing to head North could stop and have safe haven. When the Civil War came, she was very active working for the Union troops. She had an incredible set of skills and talents. In addition to being someone who knew the landscape well enough to be able to help slaves escape, she was really smart. She organized this spy ring to bring information to the South Carolina interior from the federal troops. She was also very caring, she was a nurse who used her knowledge of native plants to try to help the soldiers.

The biography that Bradford produced in 1869 is a very sketchy work. Bradford produced it in haste before she herself was heading off on a trip to Europe and the purpose was to earn money. The title, which is Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman, really does capture what the book is; it's bits and pieces, little snippets, aspects of Harriet Tubman's life . . . of moments in her life. And it's rather disjointed. So we might desire a narrative that kind of goes all the way through connecting different parts of her life, but that's not what this source is. One thing that it does do well though is that—probably in part because Bradford was so rushed—she includes all kinds of additional information about Tubman. Letters that were written to or about Tubman, quotations from newspaper articles that were about Tubman, also appear in the book. So it is a collage in many ways of Tubman's life that allows the reader to get beyond Bradford's narrative and to look at some other primary sources from the time also.

There are many moving stories in the book. One of the most moving aspects of the source is that we get these stories more or less in Harriet Tubman's voice. Now, I say more or less because this is an "as told to" account—we have to trust Sarah Bradford to relate this to us faithfully and we weren't there, so we don't know if she did. Sarah Bradford also renders Harriet Tubman's stories in Bradford's approximation of a black dialect. Which is problematic I think for us because looking back at the source we try to imagine how Harriet Tubman might have really sounded. But, that being said, there are some really moving moments in the narrative that help to fill in the picture of Tubman's life and to put flesh on the bones of the myth of her life.

This is the moment where Tubman first escapes, and Bradford describes this as Tubman passing the "magic 'line'" from slavery to freedom. This is what Tubman says about that moment: "I looked at my hands to see if I was the same person now that I was free. There was such a glory over everything; the sun came like gold through the trees, and over the fields, and I felt like I was in Heaven."

This to me is such a powerful representation of Tubman's feeling, of her emotional life, at this incredible turn of her life story. This is something we don't often get access to when we're trying to think about historical figures: how they actually felt about certain moments in their life. I think with Harriet Tubman, we think about her after this moment. We think about her as the Moses of her people, who's got that pistol and who's going through the swamps with her long skirts to take 10, 20, 30, 60—and Bradford actually says 300, that’s been debated—but to take all of those slaves to freedom. We don't see her as the young woman who was first escaping and who felt this incredible sense of joy and relief in the promise of a new kind of life. But, even though we get this sense of incredible joy from Tubman at this moment, immediately we see that she's going to face a complicated future.

Three paragraphs after she talks about feeling so happy that she is free, she talks about her extreme loneliness in this new state. She says, "I had crossed the line of which I had so long been dreaming. I was free; but there was no one to welcome me to the land of freedom. I was a stranger in a strange land." So in this moment we get a real sense of a dual emotional response that Tubman is feeling. The joy at freedom, and also the despair of loneliness and the despair of knowing that people that she loves are still enslaved.

We look at Harriet Tubman as an example of someone who has been described as this sort of heroic, mythic figure; but who was a real woman who had all kinds of struggles in her emotional life. With her first husband, for example, with poverty later on in life, for example. I think that's one thing the students are surprised about. To think of Harriet Tubman as a real person who had a host of vulnerabilities. But another thing that surprises students about this book, and I think that's troublesome about this book, is that Harriet Tubman was living and working in a particular context. When she first escaped, she was not yet hooked into the Underground Railroad network, but within a couple of years she was. She was working with white abolitionists and black abolitionists to free other slaves. There were a number of relational issues that came into her movement into this new community. I think one of the things that students feel frustrated about is the way that Harriet Tubman talks about white people.

The prime audience would have been people who had been involved in the abolitionist movement—especially in Auburn, NY, where Harriet Tubman was really beloved and also in the northeast. Bradford says that with the first edition of this book that she does not have hopes for a wide readership, that she really just wants to sell enough copies so that Tubman can raise money to live on.

Now with the second edition of the book that was published in 1886, Bradford sort of enlarges her intention for the narrative. I think you can see that in the changes she makes to the book itself—it's much more organized, she collects many more letters attesting to the importance of Tubman's story. And by the second version in 1886, Bradford seems to be really committed to the idea that she wants to set Harriet Tubman's story into the memory of the nation. Letter writers whose words are also published in the second edition say the same thing, that they are worried that this woman might actually fall out of memory and that this book is important to keep her in people's minds.

I think that went we look back at some of the details that Bradford includes in the account we can sort of broaden our understanding of what might have been the possible reasons for Tubman's success. First of all, she was a remarkable person, that much is clear. She was brilliant, and she was brave. I think that those two aspects of her character combined to make her formidable to all the people who had a bounty on her head, which was said to be as much as $12,000. I think that she was a unique individual. But in addition to that, she was someone who had had lots of different kinds of experiences as a girl. When she was a girl . . . her name was Minty then, Araminta. She changed her name to Harriet, which was her mother's first name, after she escaped to protect her identity. But when she was a girl she was hired out to a number of different families, so she wasn't just working at one plantation. So she got to see a wide variety of contexts, different kinds of households; she got to hear different slaveholders talking about things that they observed, or information that they might have been bringing to their dining room tables. I think she was able to build this broad kind of file of facts, of bits of information and names of people. And I think that that helped her to be able to escape for herself, and then to aid others in escaping later on.

There's an interesting tidbit to follow up on regarding her success, which has to do with information about Tubman that comes from the Civil War period when she was a nurse to the Union soldiers and also to the black "contraband"—as they were called—black slaves who ran away and went to the Union camps. Tubman was said to have been an incredible healer by the soldiers; she was said to have understood how to use native plants. That to me is very interesting. There's only a tidbit of this in Bradford, but it suggests that Tubman knew the environment in which she lived, that she understood something about native plants in her own home of Maryland and that she applied that knowledge to other locations, [like] when she was stationed in South Carolina for instance. So she knew the landscape. She understood how plants grew, she knew the waterways, and she was very observant; this also I think contributed to her success.

Well, the relationship between oppression and agency in the history of slavery is one that is central. It's one that I think is really apparent in Harriet Tubman's life. But it can be lost if we only focus on her as a heroic figure. That's why I think the early picture of her life is so important. Trying to imagine her as a child who did not have the benefit of protection of her parents from being sent out to various people who wanted to hire her. Tubman was actually described as a sickly child: she was a small girl and very weak, and she was often ill. When she came back to her home plantation after these stints working for other people, her mother would have to nurse her back to health because of the whippings and beatings and terrible things that she had to do, such as catching rats in the rivers.

Thinking about everything that she faced as a child—her vulnerability, her realness as a person—I think helps us to remember that slavery was an incredibly oppressive system that sought to render some people out of the category of humanity. Nevertheless, people resisted this because they were human beings. We see the necessity of defining oneself as a person, a person deserving of liberty in Harriet Tubman's life. She says—and this is recounted in Bradford's biography—that she feels that she has two rights on this earth: liberty and death. That's a familiar saying. But she is saying in that line that she feels that she is a person, with the same human rights as any other person, one of those being liberty. Regardless of the fact that she was born into a circumstance that was deeply humiliating and thoroughly violent, she determined that she was not going to accept that circumstance. But, I think it's really important to say here that most enslaved blacks were not able to escape. It took a really unusual set of circumstances that allowed some people to have the opportunity to escape. Harriet Tubman is one of those people, she stands out as the sole figure who had the kind of life that she had.

Even though we can see her life as an example of resistance and agency, we always have to remember the thousands, hundred thousands, and then millions of people who did not share the life experience that she had. But we do have the lyrics to sorrow songs that Tubman told to Bradford, and that Tubman explained the use of to Bradford. The first of these songs is not titled in the source, but I'll just read a few lines from it.

Hail, oh hail ye happy spirits, Death no more shall make you fear, Grief nor sorry, pain nor (anguish) Shall no more distress you dear.

This song goes on for four more stanzas, and Bradford recounts that Tubman sang the song to her—"sweetly" is a descriptor that Bradford uses. Tubman says that this song was a song that she would use as a signal to escaping slaves. If they heard her sing that song the first time, they should pay attention. If they heard her sing it a second time, they knew that it was safe for them to leave.

There’s another song that is recounted right near the same place in the book. This is the familiar song that many of us have heard of "Go Down Moses." Tubman recounts to Bradford the lyrics in the book, saying "Oh go down Moses/Way down into Egypt's land/Tell old Pharaoh let my people go/Old Pharaoh said that we would go cross/Let my people go/And don't get lost in the wilderness/Let my people go." Now what Tubman says to Bradford about the use of this song is that if slaves who wanted to escape heard it, they should know this was a warning that they should actually stay because there was danger on the trail. These are examples of African American cultural history—lyrics to songs and their uses preserved for us right here in this account.

She was a biographer before she wrote this, and perhaps that's why Harriet Tubman's family went to her and asked her to write this book. She uses her sort of literary license to set up scenes before she moves into Harriet Tubman's voice, which she denotes with quotations marks. I think that it would be very clear to students where Bradford begins and where Tubman begins. However, again we have to rely on Bradford for the faithful rendition of Tubman's words. Those quotation marks are a good signal to us that this is what Tubman said, but we have to trust that Bradford wrote that down accurately. We also have to work our way through Bradford's attempt to render what she viewed as an African American dialect. That creates a problem I think in terms of . . . even with the quoted material, what did Bradford think she heard, what did Bradford write down, and what did Tubman actually say? Beside that sticking point, I think that it is very clear where Bradford comes in and where her voice is in this text.

Now Bradford is writing this first edition in 1868. This is a really raw moment in American history. The Civil War has just concluded and relations between blacks and whites, North and South, are by no means clear to anyone. Bradford is writing out of an understanding of black and white relations that places black people on a lower level of civilization, of intelligence, of attainment. This comes out in the way that she writes about Harriet Tubman. She talks about Harriet Tubman's story as "a little story" and she writes that she knows that some of the readers of this book will find it unbelievable that a black woman could be considered a heroine. So Bradford's position as the writer of this book is one that we need to question as we read the text, even though there are clear demarcations between her voice and the quoted material from Tubman.

Another way that Bradford's account of Harriet Tubman's life can be very useful in the classroom is as a window into the Underground Railroad and how it functioned. Harriet Tubman after she freed herself got involved with this network of people—an informal network of people—who were committed to helping black slaves escape. These were white people, black people, women, men, who sort of banded together in this common mission. Bradford's account gives us a little window into the different techniques that they would have used, which is very valuable because of course everything they did was supposed to have been secret to protect the escaped slaves from their former owners and from slave catchers.

Another way in which this text can really be interesting I think in terms of thinking about Harriet Tubman's history and black women's history, is that it shows Harriet Tubman as an intellectual. It places her within a rubric of black women's intellectual history. The history of black women's thinking as it has changed over time. I don’t think Tubman is often thought about as an intellectual, but she was as I said earlier a brilliant woman, she had to be to accomplish all that she did over the many years that she went back to the South to help so many slaves escape. We get an inkling of her thoughts in Bradford's account—we wish for more of course, we wish Harriet Tubman had written her own account—but we do get a bit in Bradford's account. One example of that is that when Tubman is living in Philadelphia, where she works to try to earn money to fund her rescue missions, a group of people invite her to come see a stage production of Uncle Tom's Cabin. She says that she will not go, she has no need to go, because Uncle Tom's Cabin can in no way capture the reality of the experience of slavery, which she herself already knows. So this is a form of cultural criticism. She is saying that as popular as this novel was, even though it was taking the country by storm, that as a former slave that she had a more accurate version of slavery than Harriet Beecher Stowe.

Going back to the beginning of when I first read Watkins, I guess I should call her since it's 1857, was actually finding the language somewhat difficult and feeling that this was a lot to slug through and that the Sojourner Truth are these kind of short sentences and to the point and really kind of skimming over this document initially and saying, my God, this is just a lot of words and, you know, how am I going to make sense of it. Couldn’t she have spoken more simply and just kind of given us the bottom line? So the need to kind of sit down and say, okay, be patient, take an hour out and just look at this speech and try and figure out what’s going on.

And so the first thing reading through and I guess the first thing I noted was all of the different geographies that came into play. And so then saying, okay, well, you know what can I do with this? And realizing that she’s then trying to put together an international context in which then to examine U.S. slavery. And then the other thing is to say, well, why all of this heavy-duty language? These sentences, some of them go on for five, six lines and you get short of breath and so I think it takes real practice at least for somebody today to be able to really speak these sentences aloud. So another thing was, like, why does she have such long sentences? I mean why not break it down and be more like Sojourner Truth?

And in fact when you read about rhetoric of the period there was a movement apparently in the 1850s and '60s towards a more colloquial style so towards the style more of what Sojourner Truth was using but maybe not so folksy. And so Abraham Lincoln is pointed out as one of the key turning points, one of the pivotal figures in moving American rhetoric to what scholars have called the more democratic style.

So one of the things when you get over being annoyed with Harper for using these really, really long sentences, is to say okay, so what was she doing? And I remember kind of going through that process and what she’s doing is really reclaiming classical rhetoric. So I think what I did was go to my books on classical rhetoric and say, boy, she really studied with Cicero. And what she did here was to figure out the way Cicero and other Latin rhetoricians spoke and to incorporate that in her speaking style which is one of the reasons why these sentences are so long.

And then the question is why? And I think that one of the things that she was doing is much more educated, was to claim the ability for blacks at this time to use classical rhetoric and this was then the whole idea that blacks in fact have a soul and they also have a mind and they’re capable of inserting themselves into western traditions. The western tradition here is that of classical rhetoric. So that her claim to authority I guess I would say is doubled. It’s her knowledge of history and her being able to say, I can make these statements because I know history. I know world history and I can compare what’s going on in the United States to what’s going on in the rest of the world. And her other basis of authority is, my language is that of the classical tradition and I am part of this time-hallowed tradition of classical rhetoric which goes back to the Latins since the Roman period.

One of the things that’s so compelling is kind of the intimacy of the tone and here she is feeling that she can speak directly to God and God isn’t a big abstract entity out there that you have to look at with any kind of reverence, but he’s there with her and they’re having a conversation, so I think that that’s something that’s really powerful.

So when I was talking before about the issue of authority, the authority that she has that she asserts here is the authority of personal experience. My personal experience is that I can go out in the field and I can talk to God. God listens to me and God answers me. And I think that that’s what the basis of her authority is here, this kind of personal relationship that she can have with God and converse with him.

We don’t have very much in terms of the way in which Sojourner Truth’s audience reacted to her. It’s hard to tell. I think that audience reaction here might have been somewhat mixed. Because Sojourner Truth couldn’t read or write, we never know exactly what she said and what she intended. So everything about her is constructed and reconstructed. So did she actually give the speech like this or not? We don’t know. And we have to rely on the authority of Olive Gilbert in order to say, well, you know, look, this is what she said or maybe it's approximation or maybe she really didn’t.

Almost all of the accounts of the time say that basically she didn't speak standard English and that she spoke in the language very much like what’s here and all of the speeches of hers that get reconstructed by her white women friends have this kind of language. And so people refer to her language as peculiar, eccentric, idiosyncratic, and quaint. But the image that you're supposed to take of Sojourner Truth is that of an illiterate person who couldn’t speak standard English. I’ve come up across a couple accounts which say that in fact she did and that she was quite capable of speaking in standard English. So one of the issues one could talk about is did her white women friends, or whites in general, want Sojourner Truth to have this kind of folksy image? And what purpose would that serve?

Some of the things that I think that we can consider when we look at these speeches is first of all the question of audience. Who were they speaking to? And in the case of Sojourner Truth and Frances Harper the audiences are quite similar. They’re white and black women or white and blacks, not just women, but a mixed white and black audience. The black people obviously would be antislavery abolitionist people. We can imagine that the white audience might be composed of both abolitionists and people who are on the fence, and so one of the ideas is to convince them of the evils of slavery. So one of the things to consider always when dealing with speeches is who is the person talking to? This is really essential.

Another thing that I think is really interesting and here we can only kind of imagine, is here are these women braving these conventions, speaking out in public to a mixed audience, what was called a promiscuous assembly, of male and female members of the audience and that was what was really considered to be taboo, was speaking to this promiscuous assembly. And so one of the questions which I think is really interesting is what did they do with their bodies? Did these women try and speak in a way that my body isn’t here, just listen to my words and don’t pay attention to my body? So the whole idea is that engaging in this kind of public speaking a women would de-sex herself. Either take away her sexuality or actually masculinize herself. So many times these women got shouted at from the audience and they’re saying, “You’re a man!” And so one of the proofs became having to prove your femininity. So another, I think, interesting question is what do you do with the body?

And in contrast to Truth, and this is what I think is so interesting and where I think these issues of the body and self-presentation are so important, is that in all of these accounts it’s very clear that Harper tried to disembody herself. So the accounts, and they’re many and they’re quite lengthy, Frances Harper got up to speak on the occasion of etc., etc. She stood there, one of the comments is quiet, very few gestures, that she keeps her body very still. There’s a lot of attention to the quality of her voice. And so her voice is rendered as melodious and musical. And her language is pure and chaste. So very different from Truth, who as I said before spoke with her body and was very happy to thrust her body and make that part of her speech. And what we have with Harper, I think, is a kind of disembodiment, almost don’t see me. I am here speaking in front of you, but don’t see me. Don’t look at my body and simply pay attention to my voice. So I think it’s fascinating to contrast the two kind of different speaking methods of the two women.

Another question is the authority to speak. Where do you get your authority to speak? If you’re a women and you’re supposed to be domestic and in the household and you're out there speaking about a very public issue, antislavery, where do you get that authority? And then in what you say, what is the basis for the authority of what you actually say? And the last thing is more kind of close attention to the language and the style of the speech itself. What are the rhetorical techniques that you are going to use in order to persuade your audience? So I think these are some of the really important questions that one can ask when looking at these documents.

The first thing that I would do is talk to students about the 19th-century voice and that the 19th-century voice is really quite different from the 20th-century voice and that it takes a while to get used to it. And then to move on from there and to say, okay, well what can I do with this unfamiliarity? And just to, you know, read the passages over to maybe look for the personal voice. You know, we all want to know "I the speaker," what makes this Frances Ellen Watkins Harper's speech as opposed to anybody else’s.

But then to realize that part of the 19th-century voice is the omission of the eye, of the personal, and that Truth is in fact much more exceptional in that way than Harper. That it is very, very hard to find any kind of personal voice or the reliance on personal experience in these 19th-century women. And that they were very determined to keep themselves, their private self in the background. That’s not what we’re about or there's this kind of reticence and this sense of privacy, which we’ve totally lost in the 20th century. But really kind of my private business is my private business. And that I am here doing the public work of racial uplift or of abolition, of anti-slavery.

One thing that you can do, and this involves more primary research, you can go and look for other versions of the speech. So for example, Sojourner Truth's very famous “Ain’t I a Woman” speech is not the only version we have, there are at least three or four others. So if you go and look at that you find that was the—“Ain’t I a Woman” speech first came out, I think, in 1863 and the version was by Frances Gage, so a white woman abolitionist. And of course Sojourner Truth gave the speech at a women’s rights convention, sometime in the early '50s. So one of the things to think about is that Frances Gage was there but didn’t write up the account until 10 to 12 years later.

If you go to the newspapers of the time, the anti-slavery newspapers, there is in the Anti-Slavery Bugle, which comes out of Ohio and it’s a white abolitionist paper, about two weeks after Sojourner Truth gives that speech there is a rendition, a version, which would then be our first version of the speech. So one of the things one can do is compare those two versions and there are in fact interesting discrepancies between the two. If I remember correctly, Sojourner Truth says all of these things and then she says, “Ain’t I a woman.” That “Ain’t I a woman” phrase never appears in the 1851 Anti-Slavery Bugle version. Instead she says all these things and ends up by saying, “and I can do as much as any man.” So that’s not the same. “Ain’t I a woman” and “I can do as much as any man” is not exactly the same.

So one can go and do kind of this kind of mined archives, find other speeches and do this kind of comparative work. And then I guess what you can do is speculate on why the person writing up the particular version did it in that way. Well, first of all you have to say that we don’t know whether Sojourner Truth ever said “Ain’t I a woman” or not. We just don’t know. Assuming that she didn’t, why then would Frances Gage want to say that?