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| Mary Ann Shadd |
Thanks to Ontario writer/director Anthony Sherwood,
I now know about a Delaware homegirl who paved the way for African-American
female journalists and activists back in the nineteenth century. Sherwood, who
produced The Mary Ann Shadd Play in Brampton earlier this year to give students
an understanding of the contributions of people of African descent, featured
student actors in the production, held in the Peel Region of Brampton. Sherwood said he chose that
region because it has a 51 percent minority population.
Sherwood’s Website gives us the following
information about Shadd, who accomplished some significant feats, including
graduating from the Howard University School of Law in 1833 when she was 60
years old.
Check her out:
Mary Ann Shadd (1823-1893) was born in Wilmington,
Delaware of mixed African and European heritage to abolitionist Abraham Doras Shadd
and Harriet Parnell. Shadd was an educator, editor, abolitionist, lawyer,
social activist and one of the great fighters for women’s rights in North
American history. In 1850, Shadd moved from Wilmington, Delaware to Canada to
escape the Fugitive Slave Law of the United States. She settled in Windsor,
Ontario and started the first integrated school in Canada. At that time, Canada
was a segregated society. Shadd believed that separate churches, schools and
communities for blacks would ultimately undermine the search for freedom. She
campaigned for equality and integration for black people, making speeches and
addressing issues of abolition and other reforms. Shadd’s support for racial
integration embroiled her in many public disputes with both blacks and whites.
To help fight her critics, in 1853 Shadd started her
own newspaper called The Provincial Freeman and thus became the first known black female
newspaper publisher and editor in North America. The newspaper continued to be published
until 1859 and was a strong proponent for temperance, moral reform, civil rights and black
self-help while attacking the racial discrimination blacks faced in North America. It was
one of the longest published black newspapers until the Civil War. A colleague of
fellow abolitionist and publisher Frederick Douglass, Shadd was instrumental in assisting many
runaway slaves to escape to Canada via the
Underground Railroad. Shadd was also a recruiting
officer who recruited black soldiers for the Union Army during the Civil War.
A distinguished and gifted educator, Shadd
established or taught in schools for blacks in various U.S. and Canadian cities, including: Wilmington, DE;
Trenton, NJ; West Chester and Norriston, PA; New York, NY; Windsor, Ontario; Chatham,
Ontario; and Detroit, MI. After the Civil War, Shadd moved to Washington, D.C., where she was the
principal for various public high schools and wrote regularly for Frederick Douglass’s New
National Era and other papers.
In 1883 at age 60, Shadd graduated from Howard
University School of Law and was admitted to the District of Columbia bar, and thus became one of
the earliest black female lawyers in North America. Shadd fought for women’s rights all her
life, joined the National Woman’s Suffrage Association, fought for such rights with suffrage
leaders Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and testified on such issues before the
Judiciary Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives. She was also the first black woman
to cast a vote in a national election in the U.S.
