WASHINGTON, Feb. 27 (UPI) -- A statue in the Capitol Rotunda is eye-catching in many ways, but the fact that it is unfinished is the most attention-grabbing aspect of the 7.5-ton block of marble.
Susan B. Anthony, Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton are immortalized in the stone as founding heroines of the women's right movement. Then there is that misshapen uncarved section, which many believe is meant to be fashioned into the likeness of Sojourner Truth.
The National Congress of Black Women, the National Council of Women's Organizations and the National Organization for Women said they are increasing the pressure on Congress to add Truth's likeness to the statue.
C. DeLores Tucker, of the National Congress of Black Women, said that Truth, the vocal former slave who became a women's rights advocate and abolitionist, publicly campaigned for women's rights before the three suffragists already featured in the statue did.
In an essay entitled "The Struggle for Truth," Tucker wrote, "During the 1840's, when Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were laying plans for the first Women's Rights Convention in 1848, Truth was already speaking up and down the Northern United States ... Susan B. Anthony, now the most famous Suffragist, did not begin devoting herself to this movement until the 1850's."
Truth was born a slave in New York state about 1797 but became a freed woman 30 years later when New York abolished slavery. At the time she was known only as Isabella.
Around 1842, after she had become involved in religion, she became a traveling preacher using the name "Sojourner Truth." She also became associated with the Northampton Association, a community dedicated to abolitionism and pacifism. Among those at the association was Frederick Douglass.
Truth never learned to read or write, but told her story to Olive Gilbert, who put it together in the 1850 book "The Narrative of Sojourner Truth: A Northern Slave." Her talent as a speaker and the book made her a popular figure for women's rights.
Rep. Major Owens, D-N.Y., sponsored HR 601 in February 2003 calling for Truth's likeness to be added. The bill has 132 co-sponsors from the Congressional Women's Caucus and the Congressional Black Caucus.
Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, said in a news release: "Sojourner Truth once said, that 'If women want any rights more than (they've) got, why don't they just take them and not be talking about it.' This quote embodies the aggressive activism that we must engage in to earn passage of HR 601."
In 2000, the statue was moved from the basement of the Capitol, where it had been since 1921 when the National Women's Party presented Adelaide Johnson's piece to Congress as a gift honoring passage of the 19th Amendment, which guaranteed women the right to vote.
Many schoolchildren and visitors from other states and countries see the three white women who contributed so much to the suffrage movement, along with the perplexing mass of material in lieu of what many believe should be a likeness of Sojourner Truth.
"It's important for us to bring that history not just to our children in our own schools but to all the tourists and visitors who come to the Capitol," said NOW President Kim Gandy. "Without that history, we don't move forward in the way that we need to.
Alice Holmes of Rep. Diane Watson's, D-Calif., office spoke on behalf of Watson, a co-sponsor of the bill.
"There are so many young people who come and request tours of the Capitol," she said. "They have no idea why there's a blank slab there."
Martha Burke, whose the National Council of Women's Organizations is an umbrella group representing 10 million women, said that she and members of her organization along with the National Congress of Black Women and others picketed in front of the Capitol when the statue was rededicated in 1997.
"This one is a no-brainer," Burke said. "All women were part of the suffrage movement and all women have to be part of that emblem that stands for the suffrage movement."
