Sojourner Truth

• Sojourner Truth remains the most famous black female New Yorker who fought for emancipation and for women's rights. Born a slave named Isabella Baumfree in 1797 in a hamlet now called Rifton, she started to become Sojourner after the state's abolition of slavery when she found her calling attending a local Methodist church. She wanted to preach. For a time, she traveled with a white woman who was an evangelical teacher until coming to New York City and officially changing her name in 1843. She soon moved to Massachusetts to join the Northampton Association of Education and Industry because they were strong supporters of abolition and women's rights. There, she dictated her memoirs to a fellow Association member.
  
  The book's publication led to speaking engagements across the country, the most famous of which was at an Ohio Woman's Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio, in 1854, where she proclaimed her often-noted phrase, "Ain't I a Woman?" During the Civil War, Sojourner Truth encouraged black troops to enlist. After the war, at the first meeting of the American Equal Rights Association in New York City in 1867, she continued to insist that the struggle for newly freed blacks and for women's equality remain interconnected. Sojourner Truth settled in Battle Creek, Michigan, where she died in 1883.
  
  

Eliza Ann Dixon Day

• Eliza Ann Dixon Day's commitment to community activism while raising four children alone exemplifies the heroic everyday work that black women living in New York accomplished without the publicity that Sojourner Truth generated with publications and speeches. After the 1829 death of her sailor husband, Day supported her family on her meager income while continuing to be an active member of the John Street Church, America's oldest Methodist congregation, and helping found the A.M.E. Zion Church in Harlem, the oldest black church in New York. Both churches provided meeting spaces for abolitionist meetings where black women congregated to promote racial and gender equity. One of those gatherings in 1833 was attacked by a mob.
  
  

Abby Gomar

• Abby Gomar was born into slavery in 1820 in Pennsylvania but settled in New York as a free person of color, first in Tyre and then Seneca Falls. Seneca County, New York, was home to a coalition of men and women of different classes and races who stood against slavery and for women's rights. Some attended Seneca Falls' biracial anti-slavery Wesleyan Church. Abby Gomar was an active member of the Trinity Episcopal Church. She attended with her friend Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a white abolitionist and advocate of women's rights, who used Abby as an example of unfair taxation in one of her books. Abby owned her home and paid taxes on it even though she could not vote. Abby was a prominent member of the community who could speak her mind in Seneca Falls' progressive community.
  
  

Charlotte Jackson

• Charlotte Jackson settled in Ovid, in Seneca County, New York, after being born into slavery in New Jersey. In 1849, she was the only known black woman to sign a Seneca County women's anti-slavery petition that was addressed to Congress and that also addressed women's second-class legal status. Unlike the black people who came to Seneca County through the Underground Railroad, a loose network of escape routes from Southern slavery, Charlotte Jackson came to Ovid as a slave. She died in 1885 a property owner and activist. Her life indicates the possibilities of the county's progressive politics.