Welcome to the Sojourner Truth Organization Digital Archive.

The Sojourner Truth Organization, according to historian Michael Staudenmaier, was an American "revolutionary group based largely in Chicago during the 1970’s and 1980’s. STO, as it is commonly known, created a small but vibrant political tendency around the concepts of challenging dual consciousness, opposing white supremacy, supporting extra-union organizing in factory settings, defending anti-imperialist and national liberation struggles, and building an internal culture of intellectual rigor and sophistication." [STO: Notes Toward a History]

This archive, which we have been adding to for over three years, will serve as a resource for STO's newspapers (Insurgent Worker), pamphlets, shop leaflets, theoretical journal (Urgent Tasks), collaborative works (Collective Works, Tendency Newsletter), and others.

We will be making their works available in both PDF and HTML formats. The PDFs offer a view of what the original material looked like, pictures and all, for those who wish to print copies for themselves or for distribution, while the HTMLs provide a more web-friendly version.

All of our PDFs have been scanned using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology with the intent of digitally restoring them as well as to make them easier to reference and copy to any word processing program.

The only exceptions to this rule are the Insurgent Worker series and the shop leaflets included with the Workplace Papers collection. These were assembled by hand and makes OCR difficult and unnecessary. Thus they will be rendered in JPEG format.

We add materials as they are made available to us in no systematic fashion, so if anyone would like to see anything in particular or has any constructive criticism, corrections, or suggestions, please contact us at info@sojournertruth.net. If you are looking for literature on a particular subject, use the Google search feature below.

For those of you who have original prints of any STO material that you would like to donate either to the digital or physical archive, please let us know.

If there are former STO folks who would like their names to be withheld from these once-publically distributed materials, use the contact email address. We will simply remove your name from the digital archive documents.

Thank you.

-STO Digital Archive

*We have recently made changes to the archive that have affected site navigation and some links. Prior to the change, we had separate pages for Urgent Tasks and Collections publications where each publication's articles were featured. In order to simplify browsing and streamline HTML coding, we created drop-down menus for publications that have multiple articles where you can click the article from the main page. If you have trouble accessing a link, click the blank option in the drop-down selection and then click the link you want to read. Sorry for the confusion.

~KB

STO: Notes Toward a History is a blog established by Michael Staudenmaier of Chicago, IL, and is a partner site to document his many hours of study and interviews with former STO members. It is, more or less, a basis for a book to be published at a later date, but for now it will help to acquaint those who are not that familiar with the group's politics and history.

If nothing else, it is an interesting look into the personalities which composed STO as well as their 15-year (give or take) history as a revolutionary organization. The blog will hopefully give a better context as to why we are taking the time to archive a relatively marginal group like the Sojourner Truth Organization.

Click here to visit the blog.