Description: Mary Ann Shadd Cary was a courageous and outspoken nineteenth-century African American who used the press and public speaking to fight slavery and oppression in the United States and Canada. Her life provides a window on the free black experience, emergent black nationalisms, African American's gender ideologies, and the formation of a black public sphere.

Mary Ann Shadd Cary is the story of this remarkable champion of the rights of black men and women. Mary Shadd Cary was part of the small free black elite who used their education and limited freedom to fight for the end of slavery and racial oppression. Shadd Cary contributed to the early formulations of racial uplift ideologies, and these principles would be the guidepost for her activism.

Mary Ann Shadd Carry is perhaps best known as the first African-American woman to publish and edit a newspaper in North America. But her importance does not stop there. She was an active and visible participant in many of the social and political movements that influenced the nineteenth-century, abolition, black emigration and nationalism, women's rights, and temperance.She was also an adventurous and ambitious figure who emigrated to Canada in the 1850s where she taught the children of fugitive slaves and founded her newspaper, the Provincial Freeman. During the Civil War she recruited black troops for the Union Army, and in the midst of Reconstruction she entered law school at middle-age to become the second black woman in the nation.

A vociferous advocate for women's place in the black public sphere as well as in national politics, Shadd Cary battled with her male contemporaries over the right to have an authoritative voice, and she insiste on a role in black community politics both before and after the Civil War. Late in her life she also laid the groundwork for what would become the black women's club movement. A women who was consistently ahead of her time, Mary Ann Shadd Cary came to embody what W.E.B. DuBois envisioned as the "talented tenth."

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