Mary Ann Shadd Cary (PDF)

# Mary Ann Shadd Cary - **October 9, 1823 - June 5, 1893** ## Who Shall Overrule The Voice of Woman? **Rebel, they called her.** Mischief maker. Agitator. - Yes, Mary Ann Shadd was all that and so much more. - One day, Frederick Douglass watched her make her way along a New York City street. He...

# Mary Ann Shadd Cary - **October 9, 1823 - June 5, 1893** ## Who Shall Overrule The Voice of Woman? **Rebel, they called her.** Mischief maker. Agitator. - Yes, Mary Ann Shadd was all that and so much more. - One day, Frederick Douglass watched her make her way along a New York City street. He couldn't help but sing her praises. - "Coming down Broadway at a time when colored women hardly dared to think of riding in public trolleys, M. A. Shadd threw up her head, gave one look and a wave of her hand." Her manner was such that a trolley driver, "a large, coarse, ruffianly man" not known to stop for African American women, brought his team of horses to a halt, "suddenly seized with paralysis." - Mary Ann had that effect on people! ## Life Story - Mary Ann was the child of freed slaves. The family was large - she was one of thirteen children. - Although they were middle class, she could not be educated in Delaware, where they lived. - Some public schools educated black children, but they enrolled only boys. - So the family moved to Pennsylvania, where they settled in Quaker country outside of Philadelphia. - Education wasn't the only issue that prompted the move. - In Delaware, people were talking about deporting black people - enslaved or free - to Africa. - Mary Ann's father had no intention of letting that happen. - He became active in efforts to ensure that black people could live where they wanted to. - Mary Ann was ten years old when the family moved. - She attended a Quaker school and lived comfortably on a farm amid a growing free black community. - The family's house became a stop on the Underground Railroad. - But Delaware called her back - as a teacher, she wanted to make sure all black children could be educated in that state. - After teaching in Delaware, and later in two other states, Mary Ann became impatient for black people to build better lives. - Even in the North, she noted, prejudice was everywhere. - She wrote a letter to Frederick Douglass. "We should do more, and talk less," she said. He published her letter in his newspaper, The North Star. - More alarming was Congress's passing in 1850 of the Fugitive Slave Act, which allowed white slave owners to track down escaped slaves and drag them back down south. - But slave owners weren't stopping at that - even free black men and women were being snatched off the streets. - Mary Ann thought the solution was to move to Canada, where she believed that blacks could prosper. - In Canada, Mary Ann again took up teaching and in 1853 started a newspaper for the black community called The Provincial Freeman. - In doing so, she became the first African American woman to found a newspaper in North America. - The paper struggled to stay afloat on subscriptions and donations. - One day, Mary Ann opened an envelope and was delighted to find a generous donation from Lucretia Mott! - In 1856, Mary Ann married a barber named Thomas Cary, had two children, and for several decades worked tirelessly for the cause of racial uplift. - She didn't want charity from white people - she wanted her people to work hard to better their own lives. - In the waning days of the Civil War, she was asked to help enlist African American regiments to fight for the Union. - In the late 1860s, she moved to Washington, DC, where she began to work for suffrage alongside Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. - In 1874, she was among a group of handpicked suffragists who spoke before the House Judiciary Committee. "Millions of colored women today share with colored men the responsibilities of freedom," she told the committee. - On election day that year, Mary Ann and sixty-three other women headed for the polls to try to vote. When workers refused to register them, the women demanded sworn statements that they had been turned away. - Mary Ann wasn't about to slink home quietly. - In 1878, in a speech at the National Woman Suffrage Association convention, Mary Ann tied the issue of the vote to the action of political parties, one of the early suffragists to make that connection. "Mary A. S. Cary, a worthy representative of the District of Columbia... said the colored women would support whatever party would allow them their rights, be it Republican or Democrat," the record showed. - Mary Ann believed that black women needed to take leadership roles in their communities. Only then would jobs, education, and better living conditions follow. - And it would all start with the vote. "Who shall overrule the voice of woman?" she asked. - In her world, no one could. ## The Fight for Suffrage - When it came to the vote, bias was everywhere. White men wanted to keep it for themselves. And white women weren't free from prejudice either. - "Better whiskey and more of it!' is the rallying cry of great, dark-faced mobs," temperance reformer and suffragist Frances Willard said, insulting the character of African Americans. - "Think of Patrick and Sambo and Hans and Yung Tung, who do not know the difference between a monarchy and a republic, who cannot read the Declaration of Independence or Webster's spelling-book, making laws for Lucretia Mott, Ernestine L. Rose, and Anna E. Dickinson," scoffed Elizabeth Cady Stanton, slurring immigrants and African Americans alike. - "For all these ignorant, alien peoples, educated American-born women have been compelled to stand aside and wait!" groused Susan B. Anthony. - Suffragist leader Alice Paul dreamed of retiring to the country where there were still "some American people left." - Whole classes of people were judged unworthy of the vote, including Native Americans, people who couldn't read or write, African Americans, and immigrants. - Suffragists were too often willing to play to people's racist beliefs in their pursuit of suffrage support. - It is a blot on their records that cannot be erased. **Image Description** Page 2 of the book is a brightly colored collage. The background is red with yellow star shapes. A portrait of Mary Ann Shadd Cary is in the top left corner. In the top right corner is a red suitcase with a white maple leaf on it. There are two images of African American people. - The image of a woman in a dress is in the lower left corner. The image of a man wearing a top hat and riding in a horse-drawn carriage is in the center. - In large font over the image is the phrase: **Millions of colored WOMEN today Share with colored men THE responsibilities of FREEDOM** Page 3 of the book has an image of a woman to the left side of the page. The text appears to be cut off, and the woman's head is the main content.