For Barbara Allen, the ironies of traveling to Angola, Indiana, on June 6 are fairly obvious. She’ll be participating in the unveiling of a statue at the Steuben County Courthouse honoring the legendary formerly enslaved abolitionist and women’s rights activist Sojourner Truth.

The first irony is that Sojourner Truth is Barbara Allen’s sixth great-grandmother, born in 1797 in New York State and who died in Battle Creek, Michigan in 1893. The second irony is that at least once during Truth’s Indiana tour in 1861, she was arrested for speaking. It was a risk she took every time she stepped on a podium, and Allen can feel that resolve flowing through her veins.

“Just like she would holler for some rights, I’ve always