"...As you were speaking this morning of little children, I was looking around and thinking it was most beautiful. ...Of such there's millions -- who goes to teach them? You have teachers for your children but who will teach the poor slave children?

I believe in Jesus, and I was forty years a slave but I did not know how dear to me was my posterity. I was so beclouded and crushed. But how good and wise is God, for if the slaves knowed what their true condition was, it would be more than the mind could bear. While the race is sold of all their rights -- what is there on God's footstool to bring them up? Has not God given to all his creatures the same rights? I learned that I was a human being… But I believe in the next world. When we gets up yonder, we shall have all of them rights 'stored to us again -- all that love what I've lost -- all going to be 'stored to me again. Oh! How good God is.

My mother said when we were sold, we must ask God to make our masters good, and I asked who He was. She told me, He sit up in the sky. When I was sold, I had a severe, hard master, and I was tied up in the barn and whipped. Oh! Till the blood run down the floor and

I asked God, 'why don't you come and relieve me? -- if I was you and you'se tied up so, I'd do it for you.'"

-Sojourner Truth, Address to the Friends of Human Progress Meeting, October 1856

January 11th is Human Trafficking Awareness Day in the US. Human Trafficking is a form of modern day slavery. From Jan 1st-11th, we’ll be posting daily blogs with inspiration from the history of the movement to end slavery. Our resolution is to protect & defend the vulnerable and to restore & empower survivors. Join us in beginning 2012 by pausing to recharge our spirits as we carry on towards the end of slavery and the sexual exploitation of children.