Sojourner Truth, who was born a slave in the New Paltz area and went on to become a prominent abolitionist and evangelist, will soon be memorialized in bronze in the New Paltz community. It’s hoped that the life-sized statue, Sojourner Truth: First Step to Freedom, created by local sculptor Trina Greene, will help this remarkable woman’s story inspire new generations of truth-tellers. Money is being raised to cast the work in bronze, and then install it outside of the college library bearing Truth’s name in time for a planned unveiling sometime in September.
Sojourner Truth was born at the end of the 18th century, growing up on property owned by a variety of white people living in what is now Esopus, Kingston and West Park. Known originally as Isabella or Belle, Truth gave birth to five children, including one as the result of being raped by then-owner John Dumont. That same man promised to free Truth earlier than 1827, which was what New York law then required, but after reneging on that word Truth eventually left anyway, youngest child in arms, later recalling, “I did not run off, for I thought that wicked, but I walked off, believing that to be all right.” It was through religious experiences that the former slave chose the name Sojourner Truth, becoming an evangelist whose accomplishments included being the first black woman to sue a white man in New York and win (to recover Peter, a son who had been illegally sold back into slavery), working with Frederick Douglass on abolition, advocating for voting rights for women and meeting with Abraham Lincoln. Truth was an inspired speaker who never learned to read or write, but became widely known by dictating and publishing The Narrative of Sojourner Truth. In later years, Truth supported a life of traveling ministry with portraits produced through one of the earliest forms of photography, which were usually inscribed with the legend, “I sell the shadow to support the substance: Sojourner Truth.”
Truth became one of the best-known figures of that time, with a life that has been chronicled by several historians since. One of these, Carleton Mabee, was a professor at SUNY New Paltz in the late 1960 and early ’70s, which like now was a time of social upheaval and unrest. When a new library was completed on campus in 1970, it was named for this local figure who epitomized an earlier time of strife and uncertainty. That library is but one of the ways that this remarkable woman is remembered in this area, where schoolchildren learn about accomplishments like walking to Kingston to secure the freedom of a son wrongfully enslaved by appearing in a court of law. Sculptor Greene was commissioned to create a statue of the slave Isabella as a 12-year-old, which is now in Port Ewen. Local politician Dan Torres recalls doing a project about Truth as a fourth-grader in New Paltz, and how the former slave’s life story became a source of continuing inspiration. When a competition was announced in 2018 to site a new statue of Truth somewhere on the Empire State Trail which was just coming into being, Torres reached out to Greene in a bid to get that statue in New Paltz. The concept Torres pitched was to show Truth taking those first steps to freedom from owner Dumont, carrying the infant Sophia. State officials decided to place their statue on the Walkway Over the Hudson, a linear park the popularity of which made it possible to conceive of the statewide trail, but Greene held onto the sketches of those first steps to freedom.
In time, Greene approached Donald Christian, president of SUNY New Paltz, to gauge interest in the sculpture. As plans for the 50th anniversary of the eponymous library were also in the works, the timing was fortuitous. Christian was very supportive, and as Greene began working in earnest, campus officials turned to raising money to pay for the statue. Greene works primarily in clay, and spent several months studying the planes of Truth’s face, seeking to imagine how the woman appeared years earlier. The sculptor built an armature to support the life-sized body of this six-foot-tall woman, who radiates the inner light that served as a guide from those first steps to freedom through years traveling and speaking.
According to Barbara Caldwell, who works as program director for donor engagement, the completed statue will stand before the Sojourner Truth Library as the most prominent feature of the concourse that was once Excelsior Avenue, before that village street was swallowed up by the university. The campaign to raise $75,000 to complete and install the piece has nearly reached the halfway mark and donations are being accepted through the university website.
The process of casting a statue in bronze entails creating a mold of the original clay, which will be shipped to Andies, NY where it will be used to create the bronze version which will likely become an iconic location on campus. The process of creating the mold will utterly destroy the clay that Greene has painstakingly formed and detailed over the course of this pandemic, which is in a way a curious echo of those words of Sojourner Truth: “I sell the shadow to support the substance.”
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