Mary Ann Shadd Cary

American abolitionist and journalist

• Born: October 9, 1823
• Birthplace: Wilmington, Delaware
• Died: June 5, 1893
• Place of death: Washington, D.C.

A pioneering educator and lifelong advocate of equality for African Americans, Cary wrote and lectured widely in support of abolition and black emigration to Canada, and after emancipation was achieved, she participated in the woman suffrage and temperance movements. She was also first African American woman newspaper publisher and the first black woman to enter Howard University Law School.

Early Life

Mary Ann Shadd Cary was born Mary Ann Shadd, the first of thirteen children of Harriet Parnell, a mulatto woman born in North Carolina, and Abraham Shadd, a shoemaker descended from a German soldier named Hans Schad and a free black Pennsylvania woman named Elizabeth Jackson, who married in 1756. Like her father and paternal grandfather, Mary Ann was born free. The fact that her grandfather and great-grandfather had been butchers by trade secured the status of the Shadd family within the black middle class of Wilmington, Delaware, where she grew up. However, their comparative material prosperity did not spare free blacks, such as the Shadds, from the black codes that Delaware enacted during the 1830’s to restrict the freedoms of former slaves.

At an early age, Mary Ann was exposed to the movements to abolish slavery and achieve political and social equality for free African Americans. Her father was active in local and national social protests throughout his life. He offered his homes in Wilmington and later in West Chester, Pennsylvania, as stations on the Underground Railroad, which was used by people escaping from southern slavery. He also solicited subscriptions for abolitionist newspapers such as William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator. In 1831, Abraham Shadd was one of three authors and signatories of a statement condemning the American Colonization Society, which worked to ship freed slaves to Africa. He was also among the first five African Americans on the board of managers of the American Anti-Slavery Society when that organization began in 1833.

During 1833, the Shadd family escaped from the increasing harshness of Delaware’s black codes by moving to nearby West Chester, Pennsylvania. There, Mary Ann received six years of private instruction provided by local Quakers, under whom she studied Latin, French, literature, and mathematics. In 1840, when she was seventeen and her schooling was completed, she returned to Wilmington and opened a school for African American children. Throughout the 1840’s, she taught not only in Wilmington but also in West Chester and Norristown, Pennsylvania, and in Trenton, New Jersey, where she failed in an effort to establish another school for African Americans in 1844.

Life’s Work

In 1849, Mary Ann Shadd entered the public debate on obtaining black equality. During that year, she published a letter in Frederick Douglass’s newspaper, The North Star, and also published a pamphlet, Hints to the Colored People of the North , in which she stressed education, morality, and economic self-help as the means through which African Americans could integrate themselves into American society. Passage of the Fugitive Slave Act by the U.S. Congress in 1850 permitted federal marshals to reclaim runaway slaves even after they reached free states. That law added new urgency to Mary Ann’s emerging activism.

After attending an antislavery convention in Toronto, Canada, in September, 1851, Mary Ann decided to join the thousands of free and slave-born African Americans who were emigrating to Great Britain’s Canadian colonies. After giving up her teaching job in were chosen, she settled in the town of Windsor (now in Ontario). There she opened a school with the support of the American Missionary Association and became that organization’s only black missionary in Canada West. In 1852, Mary Ann published Notes of Canada West , an essay extolling the benefits of life in Canada to potential African American migrants. By the end of the decade, Mary Ann’s parents as well as several siblings had also moved to Canada.

Mary Ann’s advocacy of Canadian immigration and racial uplift challenged the established leadership of Henry Bibb, another immigrant, who had established the newspaper Voice of the Fugitive in 1851. The friction between Mary Ann and Bibb came to a head in 1853, when the American Missionary Association responded to Bibb’s criticisms of Mary Ann by withdrawing its support of her school. On March 24, 1853, the day after her Windsor school closed, Mary Ann began publishing and editing her own newspaper, the Provincial Freeman , in Toronto. She was the first African American woman to do so, even though the conventions of the time required her to list a man as the newspaper’s editor on its masthead.

The Provincial Freeman provided Mary Ann with a public voice with which to articulate her support of black immigration to Canada and racial integration and to critique other abolitionists. The newspaper also published letters and articles debating woman suffrage and women’s participation in the public sphere. Mary Ann spread her message further and solicited subscriptions for her newspaper by lecturing in the United States. She was one of only a few black women who spoke publicly during that period. In 1855, she moved her newspaper from Toronto to Chatham.

On January 3, 1856, Mary Ann married Thomas Cary, a free-born African American and barber who relocated to Toronto during the early 1850’s and had three children from an earlier marriage. Mary Ann’s marriage to Cary was unusual, in that she and her husband traveled back and forth between the separate homes they maintained in Chatham and Toronto. They had two children together: Sara Elizabeth, born in 1857, and Linton, born in 1860.

Mary Ann continued editing the Provincial Freeman until it folded in 1860 because of insufficient funds. After her husband’s death later that same year, Mary Ann taught briefly in Michigan, opened another school in Chatham with her sister, and continued to publish articles in the abolitionist press. At the urging of the black nationalist leader Martin Delaney, Mary Ann traveled throughout the United States in 1863 to encourage African American men to join the Union army during the Civil War. After the war ended, the promise of Reconstruction and diminishing employment opportunities for African Americans in Canada prompted Mary Ann’s permanent return to the United States in 1867. She worked as a teacher in Detroit before moving to Washington, D.C., in 1869.

As Mary Ann settled into life as a teacher, and later as a school principal, in Washington, D.C., she began to pay more attention to women’s issues in her social activism. She attended the yearly meetings of the National Women’s Suffrage Association during the early part of the decade and wrote frequently for Frederick Douglass’s newspaper New National Era in support of woman suffrage, a position that diverged from the African American community’s primary goal of obtaining the vote for black men. After ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment gave black men the vote in 1870, Mary Ann herself attempted to register to vote several times. In 1880, she established the short-lived Colored Women’s Progressive Franchise Association. She also advocated temperance as a means of promoting black self-sufficiency.

Meanwhile, Mary Ann became the first black woman to enter Howard University Law School. She began her legal studies there in 1869 and combined being a law student with being a teacher and school principal until she received her degree in 1883. Throughout the 1880’s, she practiced law in Washington and continued to lecture and write on strategies of racial uplift. She died of stomach cancer in Washington, D.C., on June 5, 1893, during her seventieth year.

Significance

Mary Ann Shadd Cary is remarkable, not only for her notable firsts in the fields of journalism and law, but also for the space that she carved out for herself as a woman activist during the long African American struggle to obtain racial equality. She defied the mainstream social convention that a woman’s rightful place was in the home by inserting herself into public debate, first on the issue of abolition of slavery and extension of civil rights to free blacks, and later in her advocacy of woman suffrage. She also defied the assumptions of other African American activists who asserted that gender equality should be subordinate to racial uplift. Her career as an educator, lecturer, and newspaperwoman—which did not cease with marriage and motherhood—was its own protest against the twin sets of limitations that she faced as an African American and as a woman.

Bibliography

Cimbala, Paul A. “Mary Ann Shadd Cary and Black Abolitionism.” In Against the Tide: Women Reformers and American Society, edited by Paul A. Cimbala and Randall M. Miller. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1997. This essay places Mary Ann Shadd Cary within the broader community of African American abolitionists and in relation to the particular concerns of black women activists.

Ferris, Jeri. Demanding Justice: A Story About Mary Ann Shadd Cary. Minneapolis: Carolrhoda Books, 2003. Illustrated children’s book about Shadd Cary.

Rhodes, Jane. Mary Ann Shadd Cary: The Black Press and Protest in the Nineteenth Century. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998. A thorough recent treatment of Shadd Cary’s life, this book pays special attention to her years as a newspaper editor and publisher and the role she played in the antebellum black press.

Silverman, Jason H. Unwelcome Guests: Canada West’s Response to American Fugitive Slaves, 1800-1865. Millwood, N.Y.: Associated Faculty Press, 1985. Contests the view that Canada provided a safe haven for African Americans by describing the obstacles and racism that immigrants such as the Shadds faced there.