Mary Ann Shadd was born in Wilmington, Delaware, to free African-Americans and abolitionists parents. Her father was a conductor on the Underground Railroad, and their home was a refuge for fugitive slaves. When she was 10 years old, it became illegal for African-Americans to receive education in Delaware, so the family moved to Pennsylvania, where she attended a Quaker Boarding School. At 16, after graduating high school, she established a school for black children in East Chester, and later she taught in several cities, including NYC.
At the age of 27, the family moved to Canada, following the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which allowed everyone to capture free slaves and returning them to their masters. As a natural-born activist, Shadd became an outspoken advocate for full racial integration and encouraged African-Americans to immigrate to Canada. She founded a school for both black and white children, and in 1852, she published a pamphlet titled “Notes on Canada West,” in which she discussed the benefits and the opportunities that wait for African-Americans in Canada. In 1953, she established “The Provincial Freeman” – the first anti-slavery newspaper, which made her the first female journalist in Canada and the first black female editor in North America. In its seven years of publication in Canada and the US, it explored a variety of topics, from immigration to world events and culture. Her unorthodox approach toward immigration made her a controversial figure in her community, and it almost cost her speech at the Philadelphia Colored Convention of 1855.
When Shadd was 33, she married Thomas F. Cary, and when he died four years later, while she was pregnant with their second child, she returned to the US. During the Civil War, she served as a recruiting officer, enlisting black volunteers for the Union Army. After the war, she settled in Washington, DC, where she worked as a teacher while attending evening classes at Howard University Law School. In 1883, Shadd graduated at the age of 60 and became the second black woman in the US to earn a law degree. She never stopped writing, publishing articles in numerous newspapers, including The People’s Advocate and the National Era.
Shadd was also a women’s rights activist, working alongside Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony at the National Woman Suffrage Association, and in 1880, she established the Colored Women’s Progressive Franchise – an organization promoting equal rights of African-American women. She died at the age of 70 from stomach cancer.
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