Mary Ann Shadd Cary

"Mary Ann Shadd Cary" is the story of this remarkable champion of the rights of black men and women. Mary Ann Shadd Cary was part of the small free black elite who used their education and limited freedoms to fight for the end of slavery and racial oppression. Shadd Cary contributed to the early formulations of racial uplift ideologies, and these principles would be the guidepost for her activism. Mary Ann Shadd Cary is perhaps best known as the first African-American woman to publish and edit a newspaper in North America. But her importance does not stop there. She was an active and visible participant in many of the social and political movements that influenced the nineteenth-century: abolition, black emigration and nationalism, women's rights, and temperance. She was also an adventurous and ambitious figure who emigrated to Canada in the 1850s where she taught the children of fugitive slaves and founded her newspaper, the "Provincial Freeman".During the Civil War she recruited black troops for the Union Army, and in the midst of Reconstruction she entered law school at middle-age to become the second black woman attorney in the nation. A vociferous advocate for women's place in the black public sphere as well as in national politics, Shadd Cary battled with her male contemporaries over the right to have an authoritative voice, and she insisted on a role in black community politics both before and after the Civil War. Late in her life she also laid the groundwork for what would become the black women's club movement. A woman who was consistently ahead of her time, Mary Ann Shadd Cary came to embody what W.E.B. DuBois envisioned as the talented tenth.