Cary, Mary Ann Shadd, 1823-1893

Mary Ann Shadd Cary; October 9, 1823, Wilmington, Delaware – June 5, 1893, Washington, D.C.; eldest of 13 children to Abraham Doras Shadd (1801–1882) and Harriet Burton Parnell, who were free African-Americans; father a conductor in Underground Raildroad, grew up with many fugative slaves in her house; attended a Quaker Boarding School in Pennsylvania; moved with family to Ontario, Canada; While in Windsor, Ontario, she founded a racially integrated school with the support of the American Missionary Association, published a pamphlet called, "Notes on Canada West," which was a plea for emigration and discussed the benefits, as well as the opportunities, of blacks in the area, and she also ran an anti-slavery newspaper called The Provincial Freeman, which made her the first female editor in North America; Cary, the first African-American woman to publish and own a newspaper that distributed in North America, founded The Provincial Freeman in 1853; In 1856, she married Thomas F. Cary, a Toronto barber who was also involved with the Provincial Freeman. She had a daughter named Sarah and a son named Linton; husband died in 1860 and moved with family back to US; During the Civil War, at the behest of the abolitionist Martin Delany, she served as a recruiting officer to enlist black volunteers for the Union Army in the state of Indiana. After the Civil War, she taught in black schools in Wilmington, before moving to Washington, D.C., where she taught in public schools and attended Howard University School of Law. She graduated as a lawyer at the age of 60 in 1883, becoming only the second black woman in the United States to earn a law degree. She wrote for the newspapers National Era and The People's Advocate and in 1880, organized the Colored Women's Progressive Franchise; Shadd Cary joined the National Woman Suffrage Association, working alongside Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton for women's suffrage, testifying before the Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives, and becoming the first African-American woman to vote in a national election; She died in Washington, D.C., on June 5, 1893 from stomach cancer.