Becoming A Delegate

Mary Ann Shadd Cary was born on October 9, 1823 in Delaware. Her early years were shaped by the instituting of Black codes, which heavily restricted the rights and liberties of free African Americans like her family. Her education included both formal schooling, which she received at a Quaker school, and informal education through her family’s activism. For example, she witnessed her father Abraham Shadd’s activism and even traveled with him to the first Colored Convention held in Philadelphia in 1830. The political and social strictures that excluded African Americans from voting rights, education, economic independence, and positive racial representations formed a caste system, which Shadd Cary denounced in her early writings and teaching career. However, racial violence and the expulsion of African American communities in the 1850s shifted her attention—as evidenced in her writing—to the debates around resettlement outside of the US. In 1851, she moved to Canada, where she lived for the next 15 years. While she wrote to advocate for emigration to Canada and to participate in political discussions in America, much of her work also centered Colored Conventions and racial uplift for Black settlers in Canada. At the outbreak of the American Civil War, Shadd Cary supported the Union army by working as a recruiter, traveling to Indiana and Connecticut. Her support for the Union culminated with her return to live in the US at the war’s end. Like other seasoned activists, her post-war career reflected both the rising hope of African Americans seizing new opportunities in freedom and the troubling realities of America’s Reconstruction effort failing to legally and socially secure racial equality. Shadd Cary organized labor unions in Detroit, returned to teaching in DC, became a lawyer, and participated in movements for Black and women’s voting rights. 

Scroll through this timeline  of Mary Ann Shadd Cary’s life for more information.