By The Associated Press
In 1828, years before she took the name Sojourner Truth, a Black woman who had escaped slavery with her infant daughter won a court fight in New York’s Hudson Valley to bring her son, Peter, home from Alabama.
It was a historic case of a Black woman seeking the release of her son from slavery prevailing in court against a white man. Isabella Van Wagenen, as she was known then, would gain enduring fame as an outspoken abolitionist and women’s rights advocate. As for her deposition and the rest of the court documents, they were boxed up and eventually stored among a million other records, unseen and unrecognized for their significance.
Until 194 years later.
An eagle-eyed state archivist searching for something else spotted the court re- cords in January. Now, they will briefly be on public display Wednesday at the Ulster County Courthouse in Kings- ton, New York, the same build- ing she walked into almost two centuries ago seeking justice. The eight hand-written pages offer new details about a significant turning point in her eventful life.
“This was extremely brave of Isabella,” said Nell Irvin Painter, author of “Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol.” “Just the fact that she was a woman going up against powerful men, that’s extraordinary right there. And then you add in race, and then you add in class. So it’s an amazing story.”
Painter will be among the people in Kingston on Wednesday, eager to glimpse the historic documents found by happenstance.
For the past 40 years, the papers have been safely, if anonymously, stored at the climate-controlled New York State Archives in Albany. They were uncovered there by Jim Folts, head of researcher services at the archives, who had been looking for habeas corpus examples from that era for a history book on New York’s courts.
Combing through boxes of documents, he found one from 1828. It had a woman’s name on it, which was unusual for the time. Interest piqued, he read the yelRlowed paper and saw the woman, Isabella Van Wagenen, was trying to recover her son from slavery.
“That rang the bell,” Folts said recently in an interview at the archives, “because Isa- bella Van Wagenen was then the name of the person who became known as Sojourner Truth.”
Researchers compare the surprising find to coming across missing puzzle pieces. Though Truth later recalled that the event happened in open court in the autumn of 1828, court papers indicate it happened that spring, and not in open court, Folts said. In her brief deposition, she said Peter was 9 years old.
