Portrait of abolitionist Sojourner Truth, sitting with yarn and knitting needles
For scholars of Truth’s portraits, though, the symbolism is great. Truth’s handiwork conveyed an aspect of her social justice message, that knitting represented industry and advancement. She demonstrated the skill to people she met, many of them seeking refuge in the Freedmen’s Village in Washington, D.C., in the mid-1860s, and encouraged them to take up knitting. Her audience might produce items they sold or kept for themselves. Regardless, she believed that anyone would be “much happier” if usefully employed.
It is difficult to tell whether the shawls and caps Sojourner Truth wears in these portraits are knitted or crocheted, but in all four photos, she is knitting. The Library Company notes that “[Sojourner Truth’s] knitting probably alludes to her promotion of the handcraft as an industry for advancement of former slaves.” Curious about the significance of the knitting shown in the portraits, I further researched Sojourner Truth and her knitting. It was difficult to find anything specific, but most helpful, informative, and current was a blog post on the Brooklyn Tweed website written by Ra Malika Imhotep, entitled “Part II: Crafting for Freedom,” published on July 28, 2020. In her rich analysis of the intertwined histories of Black people and handwork, Imhotep, a Black feminist scholar, confirmed that Sojourner Truth was active in a community that supported racial and gender equity in Northampton, Massachusetts called the Northampton Association of Education and Industry where abolitionists operated a silk mill, teaching escaped and former slaves skills that would help them learn to support themselves. In addition to Imhotep’s article, I have shared other primary and secondary sources I encourage you to explore below.
Although the dominant representation of the relationship between enslaved Africans and cotton is the agricultural labor of the field, there was a subset of cotton work that took place in the cloth house. The Homespun Movement is largely attributed to Anglo-American women who performed their patriotism during the American Revolution (1775 -1783) by refusing imported British materials and clothing by returning to traditional methods of weaving and spinning their own textiles. What gets cut from this story and is subsequently hard to research, is the way the labor of the enslaved enabled this valorization of domestic goods. What I do know is that some enslaved Black people, often described as elderly, disabled and otherwise unfit for agricultural work, were conscripted to the industrial labors of spinning cotton, weaving cloth and making clothes.
