Black women protest absence of Sojourner Truth on Hill statue

Jet, April 7, 1997

Plans to move a 37-ton marble memorial honoring three famous White women into the Capitol Rotunda proceeded despite protests of C. Delores Tucker.

The statue honors activists Susan B. Anthony, Lucretia Mott, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton and had been in an obscure place. Recently, both Houses of Congress agreed to display the sculpture in the Rotunda for a year.

Ms. Tucker, the chair of the National Political Congress of Black Women, protested that the statue did not recognize Sojourner Truth, an early Black woman activist. She wanted an image of Truth chiseled into the statue to correct history.

Answering the charge, Karen Staser, who headed the women's campaign to bring back the memorial, said that she could find no documentation that "the ex-slave was ever intended to be part of the statue."

Her group agreed that Sojourner Truth had made contributions. Truth addressed the equal rights convention and campaigned for Ulysses S. Grant. She tried to vote twice but was turned away both times. However, the women said historians doubted the movement led by middle-class White women would have embraced a poor, Black woman who could not read or write.