When the Civil War started, Sojourner Truth urged young men to join the Union cause and organized supplies for Black troops. After the war, she was honored with an invitation to the White House and became involved with the Freedmen’s Bureau, helping freed slaves find jobs and build new lives. While in Washington, DC, she lobbied against segregation, and in the mid-1860s, when a streetcar conductor tried to violently block her from riding, she ensured his arrest and won her subsequent case. In the late 1860s, she collected thousands of signatures on a petition to provide former slaves with land, though Congress never took action. Nearly blind and deaf towards the end of her life, Truth spent her final years in Michigan.
Source: Michals, Debra. “Sojourner Truth.” National Women’s History Museum. 2015. www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/sojourner-truth.