Enduring Truths

Runaway slave Sojourner Truth gained fame in the nineteenth century as an abolitionist, feminist, and orator and earned a living partly by selling cartes de visite of herself at lectures and by mail. This book explores how she used her image, the press, the postal service, and copyright laws to support her activism and herself.

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Runaway slave Sojourner Truth gained fame in the nineteenth century as an abolitionist, feminist, and orator and earned a living partly by selling cartes de visite of herself at lectures and by mail. Cartes de visite, similar in format to calling cards, were collectible novelties that quickly became a new mode of mass communication. Despite being illiterate, Truth copyrighted her prints in her name and added the caption "I Sell the Shadow to Support the Substance. Sojourner Truth." Featuring the largest collection of Truth's photographs ever published, Enduring Truths is the first book to explore how she used her image, the press, the postal service, and copyright laws to support her activism and herself. Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby establishes a range of important contexts for Truth's images, including the significance of a sitter copyrighting her photographic portrait in her name, the shared politics of Truth's cartes de visite and federal paper bank notes newly created to fund the Union cause, and the ways that photochemical limitations complicated the portrayal of different skin tones.
Insightful and powerful, Enduring Truths shows how Truth made her photographic portrait worth money in order to end slavery-and also became the strategic author of her public self.