Sojourner Truth, 1867

“There is a great stir about colored men getting their rights, but not a word about the colored women.”

The featured words from Sojourner Truth come from Keeping the Thing Going While Things Are Stirring, address to the American Equal Rights Association on May 9, 1867. Sojourner Truth spoke while abolitionists and suffragists were divided over constitutional amendments that would enfranchise Black men while leaving women excluded from the vote. A formerly enslaved woman who had campaigned against slavery and for women's rights, Truth insisted that Black women's claims could not be postponed or absorbed into a single-axis reform agenda. The quotation reads: 'There is a great stir about colored men getting their rights, but not a word about the colored women.' October 4 is its calendar assignment in this series; the historical date is given here so the words are not mistaken for a statement made on this day.

The line exposes how a movement can speak in universal terms while deciding that one group's rights are urgent and another group's can wait. Truth makes the omitted constituency visible inside the debate. The phrasing compresses a larger political argument into a memorable standard, but its force depends on the relationships it names: between citizen and state, principle and practice, or power and accountability. Read in context, it asks who can act, whose experience becomes visible, and what institutions must do. This approach moves attention beyond admiration for a speaker and toward the rules, incentives, and distribution of practical power that made the statement necessary.

Accounts of Truth's speeches were often transcribed by others, sometimes in dialects she did not use. This 1867 text is treated as a report of the address, so wording should be tied to that record rather than romanticized as a perfect transcript. That qualification does not erase the quotation; it defines the work required to use it responsibly. Historical reputation cannot settle the issue. A serious reading keeps achievement beside contradiction and later outcomes, while distinguishing the claim's strongest principle from uses the record cannot support. The words should open examination rather than close disagreement, especially where translation, transcription, institutional position, or unequal risk affects what an audience hears.

Coalitions still face pressure to rank equality claims. The quotation asks organizers and lawmakers to examine who disappears from a proposal and whether progress for one group creates a new structure of subordination for another. Applied now, the quotation becomes a method rather than an ornament. Readers can compare official ideals with law, budgets, enforcement, access, representation, and lived results, then decide what repair or restraint the evidence requires. That judgment should include people most affected by the policy at issue and should remain open to revision when facts change. Political memory has value when it sharpens public responsibility in the present instead of turning a complicated figure or moment into a harmless slogan.