“Self Reliance is the True Road to Independence” –Mary Ann Shadd

Mary Ann Shadd^A

“One Sunday a slave boy, without hat, coat, or shoes who had thus far eluded his pursuers, was overtaken in Chatham and about to be carried off. Mrs. Cary tore the boy from the slave hunters, ran to the court-house and had the bell rung so violently that the whole town was soon aroused… The result was that the pursuers fled before the infuriated people, happy to get away without bodily harm.”¹

As a British colony, chattel slavery ended in Canada many years before it was defeated in the United States. Given these circumstances, Canada became a refuge for many escaped slaves and still persecuted free Blacks who arrived via the Underground Railroad. Mary Ann Shadd was born the eldest 13 daughter of parents of mixed ancestry also identified as “mulatto”.² Her parents were very active in their community as her father was an underground railroad “conductor” and their household a “station”.³ In 1850, the United States Congress and Senate passed a rewritten Fugitive Slave Law which tremendously increased the danger of free Blacks being enslaved.⁴ Mary emigrated North to Southern Ontario.⁵

Although Shadd appealed to other Blacks to emigrate North in her writing, she did not plead for them simply to “run away”⁶, but more so as an opportunity to “strengthen” themselves.⁷ Mary believed that the freedom achieved by Black individuals arriving in Southern Ontario should be used to work for the collective liberation of a Black people.⁸ Mary regularly and bravely challenged the approaches of white abolitionists and the privileges of the early wealthy free Blacks, most notably Henry Bibb, the most prominent in Southern Ontario. As a fervent anti-racist, she fought against both the racist systems of chattel slavery of Blacks as well as stereotypes that free Blacks carried with them regarding whites.⁹ She founded her own integrated school as an alternative to Bibb’s support of voluntary segregation in schools. She worked to found her own newspaper, The Provincial Freeman, whose motto, “Self Reliance is the True Road to Independence”, stood in the face of Bibb’s approach of portraying free Blacks as victims in need of charity. In the mid 1850’s, Mary caused an outrage when she became the first Black female newspaper editor in North America .

This approach of fomented a culture of political actors rather than victims , arguably of an approach of solidarity not charity . Mary met with and wrote of John Brown, a militant anti-slavery activist. Had Mary not been needed as the mother of a growing family and wife of an ill man, she would have liked to have joined Osborne Anderson, Provinvial Freeman reporter, in John Brown’s 1859 doomed armed raid of Harpers Ferry . Her support of a militant approach to ending slavery is epitomized a few years later when, as a recruiter, Mary became possibly the only Black female Union Army officer.

Postbellum, Mary founded financing organization for women’s businesses and overcame her college’s sexist policies and graduated from law school in the United States at the age of 58 . She went on to fight in the United States House of Representatives for women’s rights to democratic participation and became one of the first women to vote in North America . As Mary shed much of her privilege, her struggles for her own rights and those of others were only made more difficult by her struggle for survival. Mary accomplished these formidable achievements as well as she mothered 2 children , sustained the Provincial Freeman by selling subscriptions overlong trips, and taught in the morning while studying at night.

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^A Library and Archives Canada/C-029977 ¹ Bearden, Jim and Butler, Linda Jean. Shadd: The life and Times of Mary Shadd Cary. NC Press Ltd. Toronto, 1977. pg 200. A similar account is found in: Butts, Ed. She Dared: True stories of Heroines, Scoundrels and Renegades. Toronto: Tundra Books. 2005. pg 43 ² Rhodes, Jane. Mary Ann Shadd Cary: The Black Press and Protest in the Nineteenth Century. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 1998. pg. 2. ³ Olbey, 153. ⁴ Olbey, 155 ⁵ Rhodes. 34. [--⁶ Olbey, Christian. “Unfolded Hands: Class Suicide and the Insurgent Intellectual Praxis of Mary Ann Shadd.” Canadian Review of American Studies 30, no. 2, 2000. –pg 169 ⁷ Olbey, 155. See also Mary A. Shadd. A Plea for Emigration Ed, Annotated and with an Introduction by Richard Almonte. The Mercury Press:Toronto. 1998. pg. 63 ⁸ Olbey, 154 ⁹ Olbey, ¹⁰ Rhodes, 84, 92, 95, 98-99. ¹¹ Olbey, 159, 167, ¹² http://www.commongroundrelief.org/. Common Ground Collective motto. ¹³ Bearden, 201.See also Butts, 53. ¹⁴ Bearden, 206. ¹⁵ Saldier, 59 ¹⁶ Saldier, 58 ¹⁷ Saldier, Rosemary. Mary Ann Shadd: Publisher, Editor, Teacher, Lawyer, Suffragette. Umbrella Press: Toronto. 1995. pg.60 ¹⁸ Women in History. Mary Ann Shadd Cary biography. Lakewood Public Library. <http://www.lkwdpl.org/wihohio/cary-mar.htm>. ¹⁹ Butts, 51 ²⁰ Saldier, 58

Radio Script (DRAFT)

Background: Street sounds, carriages going by

P1: What's that caffufle over there?

P2: It looks like slave catchers have snatched that boy.

P1: But wait, the new teacher has grabbed him now. She's ringing the church bell.

P2: The crowd is chasing 'em. Let's get 'em, No slavin' in Chatham!

Narrator: Mary Ann Shadd shed her class privileges to fight against oprresion like slavery and sexism. In 18**, after opening The Provincial Freeman newspaper, she would cause an uproar as the first Black female editor in North America. She later founded a women's microfinancing agency and was one of the first women to win a vote.

Mary Ann Shadd: a part of this territory's heritage... heritagemoments.ca” -