October 9 - Mary Ann Shadd Cary

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On this day, in 1823, Mary Ann Shadd, the first female African-American publisher and newspaper editor in North America, was born in Wilmington, Deleware. Mary started life a little differently than most black people in America at that time: she was born free. Her great-grandfather, John Shadd, had been a Hessian soldier who came across the Atlantic to aid Britain in the French and Indian War. He was wounded and found himself in the care of a free black woman, Elizabeth Jackson, and her daughter, also named Elizabeth Jackson. Things progressed as they sometimes do between an invalid and a nurse. John and the younger Elizabeth were married in January 1956. Six months later, their first son was born (you do the math).

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John’s grandson (and Mary’s father), Abraham, had a shoemaking shop in Wilmington. The shop also happened to be a busy stop on the Underground Railroad. Mary’s childhood home was frequently host to fugitive slaves. When the state of Delaware decided to make it illegal to educate black kids, Abraham moved the family to West Chester, Pennsylvania. He opened another shoe shop and Railroad stop, becoming active in the local abolitionist movement. In 1933, he was elected President of the Philadelphia chapter of the National Convention for the Improvement of Free Colored People. When she was old enough, Mary was sent to a Quaker boarding school to continue her education. She returned to West Chester in 1840 and opened a school of her own for the town’s African-American children.

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For the next decade, Mary, her father, Abraham, and her brother, Isaac, remained active in the abolitionist movement in West Chester. The passing of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, however, made life much more difficult. When it became clear that even free black citizens of the north were in danger of being kidnapped into a life they’d never experienced, Mary and Isaac moved to Windsor, Canada (Abraham would follow several months later).  It didn’t take Mary long to found a school in her new home, this one racially integrated. She also began writing pamphlets extolling the benefits that living in Canada gave to African-Americans and urging people to migrate. She was soon editing an anti-slavery newspaper, The Provincial Freeman, making her the first black editor in Canada and the first female black editor in all of North America. Isaac ran the business end of the paper, making sure that the editorials written by his sister were distributed not only in Canada but throughout the northern United States as well.

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While acting as editor-in-chief of the Freeman, Mary also traveled extensively, giving speeches against slavery and, controversially, for emigration. Her strong advocacy for black people simply moving to Canada very nearly kept her out of the 1855 Philadelphia Colored Convention. She was narrowly allowed to attend and apparently impressed the other delegates with her speech. I say apparently because she’s barely mentioned in the notes of the convention, most likely because she was a woman (sexism, unfortunately, knows no racial constraints).

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In 1856, Mary married Thomas Cary, a barber in Windsor and a contributor to the Freeman. They had two children together before Thomas passed away in 1860. At that point, she ceased publication of the Freeman and moved back to the United States with her children. During the Civil War, she lived in Indiana, recruiting black soldiers for the Union Army. Following the war, she returned to Delaware, teaching in black schools in her hometown of Wilmington. In the late 1870s, she moved to Washington DC and began attending classes at the Howard University School of Law, the first woman to do so. She would graduate in 1883, at the age of 60, the first African-American woman to earn a law degree and one of only a handful of women in America period.

With the issue of slavery in America settled, Mary changed her activist focus and became part of the Women’s Suffrage movement. In 1880, she organized the Colored Women’s Progressive Franchise, a Washington club that advocated financial autonomy and the right to vote for black women. The CWPF was ahead of its time and didn’t last for long but it paved the way for the slew of similar clubs that popped up around the nation in the 1890s. Undaunted by the club’s failure, Mary joined forces with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, eventually testifying on behalf of all women before the Judicial Committee of the US House of Representatives on several occasions. She passed away from stomach cancer on June 5, 1893 at her home in Washington DC. The home, in the historic U Street Corridor, was designated a national landmark in 1976 and Mary herself was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 1998.

Also on this day, in Disney history: Pete Doctor