Wooden's Wisdom - Volume 12 | Issue 594 |
Craig Impelman Speaking | Championship Coaches | Champion's Leadership Library Login | |
"TURN CONFRONTATION INTO COOPERATION" (SOJOURNER TRUTH) Sojourner Truth is an inspiration. Sojourner was an American abolitionist and women's rights activist who was born into slavery in 1797 and escaped it in 1826. She rose from these beginnings to become one of the most famous orators and activists in American history.
A memorial bust of Truth was unveiled in 2009 in Emancipation Hall in the Visitor Center in the U.S. Capitol. She is the first African American woman to have a statue in the Capitol building.
At the Woman’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio in 1851, men continued to demand superior rights and privileges, on the grounds of males being the stronger gender, having a "superior intellect" and the "manhood of Christ". Sojourner Truth quietly walked to the podium and took over. She proceeded to deliver one of the most famous speeches in American History: "Ain’t I A Woman".
"I am a woman’s rights. That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, lifted over ditches and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And Ain’t I a woman?
I have as much muscle as any man and can do as much work as any man. I have plowed and reaped and husked and chopped and mowed. And Ain’t I a woman?
As for intellect, all I can say is, if women have a pint and man a quart - why can’t she have her little pint full? You need not be afraid to give us our rights for fear we will take too much, for we can’t take more than our pint will hold. Give us our rights and you will feel better.
Then that little man in black there, he says women can’t have as much rights as men, because Christ wasn’t a woman! Where did your Christ come from? From God and a woman! Men had nothing to do with Him. If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, these women together ought to be able to turn it back and get it right side up again!
Man is in a tight place, the poor slave is on him, woman is coming on him, and he is surely between a hawk and a buzzard."
The continuous applause was deafening. History was made. Sojourner had taken on the conflict and created cooperation.
Can you?
Yours in Coaching, Craig Impelman
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Life’s Single Standard There are a thousand ways to cheat and a thousand ways to sin; Edgar Albert Guest (1881-1959)
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