Congress Honors Suffrage Leader Sojourner Truth

On December 6, the Senate approved, by unanimous consent, a bill (H.R. 4510) that would allow for the placement of a bust depicting Sojourner Truth in the U.S. Capitol. The House approved the bill on December 19, 2005 (see The Source, 12/21/05).

Sponsored by Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX), the bill contains the following findings:

• Sojourner Truth was a towering figure among the founders of the movement for women’s suffrage in the United States, and no monument that does not include her can accurately represent this important development in our nation’s history; and
• the statue known as the Portrait Monument, originally presented to Congress in 1920 in honor of the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment guaranteeing women the right to vote and presently exhibited in the rotunda of the Capitol, portrays several early suffragists who were Sojourner Truth’s contemporaries but not Sojourner Truth herself, the only African American among the group.