Sojourner Truth: Civil Rights Activist

Rhetorical Analysis Sojourner Truth, a black Civil Rights Activist, was born in 1797 and raised in a minefield of mistreatment and slavery. She ran away from the New York estate where she was enslaved when her owner failed to obey the New York Anti-Slavery Act of 1827. She spent the remainder of her life fighting against inequality and injustice. In 1851, Truth spoke at a Woman’s Rights Convention, advocating and sharing her ideas on equal rights between those of men and women, specifically black women. This speech, “Aren’t I a Woman”, uses strategies to fire up her audience and fight for a change. Truth commences her speech with immediately building her credibility. She begins by directly addressing her audience by saying “Well, children” (Para. 1), this builds her ethos as her audience is not children with fiery a passion for equality. Her audience is filled …show more content…
She roars, “If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, these women together ought to be able to turn it back, and get it right side up again! And now they are asking to do it, the men better let them” (Paragraph 5). This antithesis fights for the rights of women because it shows the sheer strength of females, and shows that one woman may have ruined something, but if one woman has the power to break it, then millions definitely have the power to fix it. Sojourner Truth was a feminist and civil rights advocate way ahead of her time, but she was able to pull the values of the people living in her time period together to create a strong argument for the rights of women. She was able to pull into the personalities of every listener and reader and if not sway completely, begin to pull people toward the growing support of civil rights in this speech by creating a very valid and trustworthy