Mary Ann Shadd Cary

Mary Ann Shadd was born free in Wilmington, Delaware, on the ninth of October 1823, the eldest of thirteen children of Abraham Doras Shadd — a free Black shoemaker, abolitionist organizer, and conductor on the Underground Railroad. She was educated at a Quaker school in West Chester, Pennsylvania, and taught Black children in Wilmington, New York City, and Norristown through her twenties.

The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 — which required Northern states to assist in the return of escaped enslaved people — prompted her, like thousands of other Black Northerners, to emigrate to Canada. She settled in Windsor, Ontario, in 1851 and opened a racially integrated school.

In 1853 she founded The Provincial Freeman — the first newspaper edited and published by a Black woman in North America, and the second Black newspaper of any kind in Canada. She edited it for four years and used it to argue for full Canadian citizenship for Black emigrants, to challenge anti-Black prejudice in Canada West, and to refute the back-to-Africa thesis that her contemporary Henry McNeal Turner (also placed in this archive) was developing south of the border.

She returned to the United States in 1863 to recruit Black soldiers for the Union Army. She remained in the United States after the war, took her law degree at Howard University in 1883 — among the first African American women to earn one — and practiced law in Washington, D.C., while continuing women's-suffrage organizing.

She died in Washington on the fifth of June 1893, age sixty-nine.

She is honored here as the first Black woman to edit a newspaper in North America.