A Legacy of Courage and Justice
There is a plaque outside the Ulster County Courthouse in Kingston, New York that most people walk right past; some folks daily. I’ve been guilty of it. It marks the legal victory of a woman born around 1797 into slavery in Ulster County, who was later sold at age nine for one hundred dollars and a flock of sheep. At birth, her name was Isabella Baumfree. She would later rename herself Sojourner Truth, which, honestly, is one of the most awesome things a person could do — decide, as a formerly enslaved woman in nineteenth century America, that your name is going to be “Truth” and that you are going to spend your life living up to it.
Ulster County is in the 3rd Judicial District of the State of New York where I serve as a judge. Seven counties, over 100 courts, a lot of ground to cover. I am writing this at the end of February, which means we are standing exactly on the seam between Black History Month and Women’s History Month — and if you are looking for a figure who belongs squarely at that intersection, who, in fact, lived her entire life at that intersection before anyone called it that, Sojourner Truth is your person.
Sojourner Truth: A Trailblazer
Sure, Sojourner Truth was a powerful, charismatic speaker who campaigned against slavery, segregation, and for women’s suffrage. But here is the thing about Sojourner Truth that doesn’t always come to mind at first: she used the courts. In 1828, she went to the courthouse in Ulster County to recover her five-year-old son Peter, who had been illegally sold into slavery in Alabama. She won. She became the first Black woman to successfully sue a white man in this country and prevail. Just think about what grit that required — not just courage, but a particular kind of faith in a system that had given her absolutely no reason for it. She walked into that courthouse and said, essentially: you said there were rules. I’m holding you to your own rules.
A Personal Journey
I became a lawyer at 31 — what they politely call a “non-traditional student,” which is a nice way of saying that, for whatever reason(s), I did it the long way around. I graduated valedictorian from Mechanicville High School, earned a teaching degree from the State University of New York, spent years figuring out what I was supposed to do with that, and eventually ended up at Albany Law School with people who had been planning to be there since the fifth grade. I went on to work as an assistant district attorney in Sullivan County and 21 years later became Sullivan County’s first female County Court judge and surrogate, acting Family Court judge and acting state Supreme Court justice.
I say that not to pat myself on the back, but because being a “first” comes with a particular weight: the awareness that you’re not just there for yourself, that someone before you made it possible, and that someone after you is watching.
The Weight of Being a “First”
It appears that Sojourner Truth understood that weight better than most. She didn’t have the luxury of being celebrated as a “first.” She walked into the 1851 Women’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio, uninvited and delivered a speech that still gets argued about — historians debate what she actually said, because the most famous version was written down twelve years later by someone else, in a southern dialect Truth never spoke. Sojourner Truth spoke in upper New York “low Dutch” dialect as her first language, and English with a Dutch accent as her second language. As often happens, the version that got polished and repeated was the one that fit the story people wanted to tell about her. There’s an entire lesson in that.
What she actually said, according to the account published a few weeks after the speech, was something like: “I have plowed and reaped and husked and chopped and mowed, and can any man do more than that?” No southern drawl. No performance. Just a direct question from a woman who had done the work and was tired of being told that it did not matter.
Advocating for Fairness
I now co-chair the 3rd Judicial District Gender Fairness Committee of the New York State Courts. The work is not glamorous. I am seeing that it involves a lot of meetings, a lot of listening and asking a lot of questions that make people feel uncomfortable — questions about whether the courts in our district are actually serving the people who come through them. As litigants. As victims. As professionals. The answer, if we’re honest, is: sometimes yes, sometimes no, and we have more work to do.
Truth never confined herself to one lane. She understood before anyone had the vocabulary for it that race and gender were not separate problems – that a movement claiming to fight for women while quietly excluding Black women wasn’t actually fighting for women. She pushed back on that, again and again, in rooms full of people who didn’t necessarily want to hear it. I have a lot of admiration for people like that. Occasionally, I do it myself with varying degrees of success.
The Challenges Faced by Women in the Courts
The women who use our courts most often are the ones carrying multiple burdens at once – poverty, language barriers, immigration status, disabilities. They’re the ones least likely to have an attorney and most likely to be standing alone at a courthouse counter trying to figure out what form they need. They deserve a system that takes them seriously. Sojourner Truth knew what it was to stand in front of an institution that wasn’t built for her and demand that it work. That’s not ancient history in the courts. That’s any Tuesday.
A Lasting Impact
Truth was born enslaved, right here. She renamed herself. She walked into courtrooms and convention halls where she was not expected and made herself impossible to ignore. She died in 1883 after spending decades doing work most people said wasn’t hers to do. We spend February honoring Black History and March honoring Women’s History, as if those two are separate filing cabinets. Sojourner Truth’s entire life was an argument that they aren’t. She didn’t get to choose which month claimed her. She didn’t get to choose which movement needed her more. She just did the work, in both, at once, without waiting for an invitation.
Next time you’re in Kingston, look for the plaque. Don’t walk past it.
E. Danielle Jose-Decker serves as acting Supreme Court justice, acting Family Court judge, County Court judge, surrogate, and supervising judge of town & village courts for the 3rd Judicial District of New York State. She is co-chair of the 3rd Judicial District Gender Fairness Committee.
