Mary Ann Shadd Cary

Mary Ann Shadd Cary was a courageous and outspoken nineteenth-century African American who used the press and public speaking to fight slavery and oppression in the United States and Canada. 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 is 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 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 emigrated in the 1850s to Canada, where she taught the children of fugitive slaves and founded a 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, she insisted on a role in black community politics both before and after the Civil War. Late in her life she also laid the ground-work for what would become the black women's club movement. Her life offers a window on the free black experience, emergent black nationalisms, African American gender ideologies, and the formation of a black public sphere.