By TaRessa Stovall

Sojourner Truth, the former slave-turned abolitionist and early women’s rights crusader, made history on Tuesday, April 28, 2009, when she became the first African-American woman to have a memorial in the U.S. Capitol.

First Lady Michelle Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi helped unveil the bronze bust of Truth, a former slave and women’s rights activist, in Emancipation Hall at the newly-opened Capitol Visitor Center in Washington, DC, where it will remain in honor of the slave labor that helped build the Capitol.

“I am proud to be able to stand here on this day,” Obama said, adding that when she and her two daughters visit the Capitol, they will “see the face of a woman who looks like them.”

Acting legend Cicely Tyson gave a presentation of Truth’s iconic speech which said, in part:

That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere.

Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place. And aren’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 aren’t I a woman?

I could work as much and eat as much as a man – when I could get it – and bear the lash as well. And aren’t I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen them most all sold off into slavery, and when I cried out with a mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me!

And aren’t I a woman?

The statue was commissioned by the National Congress of Black Women (NCBW), which fought a nearly ten-year battle to honor Sojourner Truth as a symbol of struggle and victory.

Sojourner Truth

The bust of Truth was described by the Los Angeles Times as perhaps “the greatest commission” of sculptor and painter Artis Lane, 81, of L.A. “The world’s coming around to seeing black as beautiful,” Lane told the Times. “When I came up, they were laughing at darker people.”

Lane, whose creations are included in the collections of Oprah Winfrey, Nelson Mandela and Maya Angelou, was asked by Rosa Parks to design her congressional Gold Medal. President Bill Clinton bought her painting of Hillary, and she has created works for Michael Jordan, Quincy Jones and Armand Hammer. Truth is “someone I deeply admire,” Lane said in the newspaper interview.

The unveiling of the artwork was the culmination of a nearly ten-year effort led by the late Dr. C. Delores Tucker, former chair of NCBW, and completed by current National Chair, Dr. E. Faye Williams, Esq., and members of the nonprofit organization, which was founded by the late Shirley Chisholm and Tucker for the educational, political, economic and cultural development of African-American women and their families.

According to the Associated Press, “Truth met presidents Abraham Lincoln in 1864 and Ulysses S. Grant in 1987, and delivered her famous “Ain’t I a Woman?” speech at a woman’s rights convention in Akron, Ohio, in 1851. She tried to vote on two occasions, but was turned away both times.”

TaRessa Stovall is Managing Editor of TheDefendersOnline and Web Content Manger for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc.