Mary Ann Camberton Shadd Cary (October 9, 1823 – June 5, 1893) was an American-Canadian anti-slavery activist, journalist, publisher, teacher, and lawyer. She was the first black woman publisher in North America and the first woman publisher in Canada. She was also the second black woman to attend law school in the United States. Mary Shadd established the newspaper Provincial Freeman in 1853, which was published weekly in southern Ontario. It advocated equality, integration, and self-education for black people in Canada and the United States.
Mary's family was involved in the Underground Railroad, assisting those fleeing slavery in the United States. After the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, her family relocated to what is today southern Ontario, Canada (then the western part of the United Canadas). She returned to the United States during the American Civil War, where she recruited soldiers for the Union. Self-taught, Mary went to Howard University Law School, and continued advocacy for civil rights for African Americans and women for the rest of her life.
Mary Ann Camberton Shadd was born on October 9, 1823, in Wilmington, Delaware, the eldest of thirteen children of Abraham Doras Shadd and Harriet Parnell Shadd. Her parents were free African Americans active in abolitionist circles, and the family home often served as a refuge for freedom seekers traveling on the Underground Railroad. The family was Catholic.
Because Delaware law restricted the education of Black children, the Shadd family moved to West Chester, Pennsylvania, where Shadd attended a Quaker school and began teaching while still young. She later taught in Delaware, Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey.
Shadd Cary was one of thirteen children in a family engaged in abolitionist organizing in the United States and later in Canada West. Several of her siblings went on to notable public careers:
Isaac D. Shadd served in the Mississippi Legislature during Reconstruction from 1871 to 1874.
Eunice P. Shadd graduated from Howard University College of Medicine in 1877 and became a physician.
Abraham W. Shadd trained in law at Harvard University and practiced in North Buxton, Ontario.
Emeline Shadd joined the faculty of Howard University in Washington, D.C., among the earliest women appointed there.
Educational work and integrated schooling
Education was central to Shadd's approach to racial equality. Raised in a family committed to abolition and literacy, she began teaching as a teenager. In 1840, at the age of sixteen, she established a school for Black children in Wilmington, Delaware, at a time when Delaware law restricted or prohibited the education of African Americans. Teaching under such conditions required organization and resolve. She later taught in Norristown, Pennsylvania, New York City, and other northern communities, gaining experience within networks of Black and abolitionist educators.
After the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, Shadd emigrated to Canada West (now Ontario). In 1851 she opened a school in Windsor, Ontario, and soon after established another in Chatham, Ontario, serving the children of formerly enslaved families and free Black settlers who had migrated north.
The Windsor school offered day classes for children and evening instruction for adults, many of whom had been denied literacy under slavery. The schools welcomed both boys and girls. At a time when separate schools for Black students were common in parts of Canada West and the United States, Shadd resisted segregation as a permanent solution to discrimination. She argued that Black children should attend common schools alongside white students whenever possible. This position placed her at odds with some Black leaders who supported separate institutions as a pragmatic response to inequality.
For Shadd, education was not charity but preparation for citizenship. She emphasized literacy, discipline, and economic independence, arguing that progress required "self-reliance rather than dependence." In her speeches and later in the pages of the Provincial Freeman, she framed schooling as both practical training and political assertion.
After returning to the United States during the American Civil War, Shadd continued teaching. She worked in Black schools in Wilmington before relocating to Washington, D.C., where she taught for approximately fifteen years in the city's public schools and later at Howard University.
In 1848, Frederick Douglass asked readers in his newspaper, The North Star, to offer their suggestions on what could be done to improve life for African Americans. Shadd, then 25 years of age, wrote to him to say, "We should do more and talk less." She expressed her frustration with the many conventions that had been held to that date, such as those attended by her father, where speeches were made and resolutions passed about the evils of slavery and the need for justice for African Americans. Yet little tangible improvement had resulted. Douglass published her letter in his paper.
When the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 in the United States threatened to return free Northern blacks and escaped slaves into bondage, Shadd and her brother Isaac Shadd moved to Canada, and settled in Windsor, Ontario, across the border from Detroit, where Shadd's efforts to create free black settlements in Canada first began.
An advocate for emigration, in 1852, Shadd published a pamphlet entitled A Plea for Emigration; or Notes of Canada West, in Its Moral, Social and Political Aspect: with Suggestions respecting Mexico, West Indies and Vancouver's Island for the Information of Colored Emigrants. The pamphlet discussed the benefits of emigration, as well as the opportunities for blacks in the area.