a biography of the day--mary ann shadd cary
bout Mary Ann Shadd Cary:
Dates: October 9, 1823 - June 5, 1893
Occupation: teacher and journalist; abolitionist and women's rights activist; lawyer
More About Mary Ann Shadd Cary:
Mary Ann Shadd was born in Delaware to parents who were free blacks in what was still a slave state. Education even for free blacks was illegal in Delaware, so her parents sent her to a Quaker boarding school in Pennsylvania when she was ten through sixteen years old.
Mary Ann Shadd then returned to Delaware and taught other African Americans, until the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850. Mary Ann Shadd, with her brother and his wife, emigrated to Canada in 1851, publishing "A Plea for Emigration or Notes of Canada West" urging other black Americans to flee for their safety in light of the new legal situation which denied that anyone black had rights as a U.S. citizen.
Mary Ann Shadd became a teacher in her new home in Ontario, at a school sponsored by the American Missionary Association. In Ontario, she also spoke out against segregation. Her father brought her mother and younger siblings to Canada, settling in Chatham.
In March of 1853, Mary Ann Shadd began a newspaper to promote emigration to Canada and to serve the Canadian community of African Americans. The Provincial Freeman became an outlet for her political ideas. The next year she moved the paper to Toronto, then in 1855 to Chatham, where the largest number of escaped slaves and emigrant freemen were living.
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Mary Ann Shadd Cary died in Washington, D.C., in 1893.
http://womenshistory.about.com/od/aframer18631900/p/mary_ann_shadd.htm
