TheWeekInCongress.com (TM)

Week Ending December 8, 2006

H.R.4510 To direct the Joint Committee on the Library to accept the donation of a bust depicting Sojourner Truth and to display the bust in a suitable location in the rotunda of the Capitol.

Sojourner Truth was born Isabella Baumfree in 1797 in upstate New York. She was one of 13 slave children and spoke only Dutch. She was sold at age eleven and was treated poorly until learning English. She was subsequently sold several other times. Truth was forced by a slave master to marry a fellow slave with which she had five children. A promise of freedom was reneged and Truth ran off with her infant child after emancipation. It was during the journey that, after having a revelation, changed her name to Sojourner Truth and walked through Long Island, Connecticut and New Hampshire preaching God’s truth and plan for salvation.

She teamed up with other African American activists and eventually added women’s suffrage to her list of concerns and her oratories.

In 1920 Congress was presented with a sculpture depicting the Women’s Suffrage activists but Truth, the only African-American, was not included.

This bill authorizes Congress to accept and display a bust of Truth. The original bill would have placed her sculpture adjacent to the 1920 sculpture of other activists. The bill was amended by Rep Richard Pombo (R-CA-11^th) to provide that the statue be placed in an appropriate location within the Halls of Congress.

Sponsor:  Rep. Sheila Jackson-Lee (D-TX-18^th)

Vote: Passed House amended December 5, 2006 by voice vote. Passed Senate December 6, 2006 by Unanimous Consent.

Cost to the taxpayers: No discernible cost.

## All Rights Reserved. © 2006 TheWeekInCongress.com(TM)

No reproduction, language translation or distribution without written permission from TheWeekInCongress.com.(TM)

MORE INFORMATION

Congress finds as follows:

    (1) 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.

    (2) 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.

## All Rights Reserved. © 2006 TheWeekInCongress.com.(TM)

No reproduction, language translation or distribution without written permission from TheWeekInCongress.com.(TM)