Audio
And Nothing Less Extras: Sojourner Truth
Transcript
Rosario Dawson: We all know Sojourner Truth as an abolitionist and a women’s rights activist. But, did you know she was also something of a media mogul?
If you know her story --- she was born into slavery in the 1790s, beaten, and sold several times --- that doesn’t really track. But lemme explain.
By the middle of the 19th century, Sojourner Truth was already captivating audiences with her life story. She would tell them about her life in slavery and her escape to freedom. She also talked about the need for justice and reform.
Retta: And around this time, photos had become relatively cheap and easy to circulate. And Americans were hungry for images. Here’s our resident expert on all things visual, historian Allison Lange
allison lange: For those of us who remember photography before our iPhones, negatives were able to kind of exist in a way that you could create as many prints from that negative as possible. But in the 19th century they made them from glass plates. So once they did that, you could purchase photographs of any kind of famous person. And most Americans by the mid 19th century had these photograph albums in their parlors. And in addition to having photographs of their family and friends that they would exchange, they also had photographs of the famous political leaders of the day and actresses, writers, because otherwise, unlike today where we can just Google what these people look like people had no idea what these important figures looked like. RD: So, Sojourner Truth saw this market as an opportunity, not only to earn a living, but to control her own identity. And for a person who had been owned as property, you can only imagine the power in this.
allison lange: So in the 1860s, she decides to start sitting for carte de visite portraits. They're kind of like baseball cards. They're very cheap. You trade them with your friends. You want to just collect them of all your kind of most interesting figures of the time period. And she really chooses a particular version of herself to represent the public. You can see here from her story that she is not the traditional idealized woman of this time period, but in her portraits, she's often seated regularly next to it, kind of like a domestic home setting, like a parlor with a vase of flowers next to her...a book, knitting, all of these things that really suggest femininity, domesticity, which absolutely was not something that she spent as much time on as perhaps other people would have in that period. And so she chose the way that she wanted to represent herself to the public in a meaningful way.
R: She not only chose the way she wanted to appear, she made sure she owned her own copyright, which was very rare. She put her own slogan on every card, so people knew she was the owner. “I Sell the Shadow to Support the Substance.”
You see, back in the 19th century, people called photos “a shadow,” since they were literally made using sunlight on glass plates. So Truth was selling her own image to support herself, to support her speaking tours and to support her reforms.
That’s a business model we all can learn from.
allison lange: She had been an enslaved woman. She's now a free woman. And she wants to fully control what part of herself is available to the public to purchase.
Description
Did you know Sojourner Truth was a media mogul?
Duration
3 minutes, 41 seconds
Credit
PRX, WSCC, NPS
Date Created
08/19/2020
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