Unsung History17 Jan 2022

Mary Ann Shadd Cary

Mary Ann Shadd Cary, born in Delaware in 1823, was a teacher, a writer, an abolitionist, a suffragist, and a lawyer, and is considered to be the first Black woman to publish and edit a newspaper in North America, The Provincial Freeman. When abolitionist Frederick Douglass asked readers of his newspaper in 1848 for suggestions on how to improve life for African Americans, Shadd Cary answered: “We should do more and talk less,” and she spent her life following that motto in both the United States and in Canada, despite the challenges she faced both as an African American and as a woman.

To help us understand more, I’m joined by Dr. Jane Rhodes and Dr. Kristin Moriah. Dr. Rhodes is a Professor of Black Studies at the University of Illinois Chicago and author of Mary Ann Shadd Cary: The Black Press and Protest in the Nineteenth Century. Dr. Moriah is Assistant Professor of African American Literary Studies at Queen's University and a Visiting Fellow at the Center for Black Digital Research (CBDR) at Penn State where her projects include digitizing Mary Ann Shadd Cary's papers.

Our theme song is Frogs Legs Rag, composed by James Scott and performed by Kevin MacLeod, licensed under Creative Commons. The image is the only known photograph of Mary Ann Shadd Cary; the photographer is unknown.

Additional Selected Sources:

“Overlooked No More: How Mary Ann Shadd Cary Shook Up the Abolitionist Movement,” by Megan Specia, The New York Times, June 6, 2018.
“Mary Ann Shadd Cary: History,” by Adrienne Shadd, Library and Archives Canada, November 1, 2019.
“Mary Ann Shadd Cary: Lawyer, Educator, Suffragist,” by Jennifer Davis, Library of Congress, February 28, 2019.
Black Women's Organizing Project, Center for Black Digital Research, Penn State
“Mary Ann Shadd Cary: In the Here and Now (Day 1) [video],” Recorded on October 1, 2021.
“Mary Ann Shadd Cary: In the Here and Now (Day 2) [video],” Recorded on October 2, 2021
“Mary Ann Shadd Cary Event Series: The Power of Black Art [video],” Recorded on October 9, 2021.

Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

Denne episoden er hentet fra en åpen RSS-feed og er ikke publisert av Podme. Den kan derfor inneholde annonser.

Episoder(230)

Jane Addams, Hull House, and Chicago's Nineteenth Ward

In the fall of 1889, Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr opened Hull House on Chicago’s Near West Side, full of good intentions to help the poor people of the neighborhood. They were a force for good, p...

10 Aug 46min

Buddy Bradley

Buddy Bradley, born in the Jim Crow South in 1905, made his way to Harlem at age 16 where he learned to tap dance and became a chorus boy. He was sought out on Broadway as both teacher and choreograph...

27 Jul 50min

The All-American Girls Professional Baseball League

During World War II, afraid that major league baseball would need to pause while men were overseas fighting, Philip K. Wrigley, chewing gum mogul and owner of the Chicago Cubs, spearheaded a new profe...

13 Jul 54min

The Declaration of Independence

The Continental Congress voted to break from Great Britain on July 2, 1776, and approved the text of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, but it took weeks for the news to spread throughout the ...

29 Jun 48min

The Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building

The Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building loom large in the American imagination, symbolizing the conflicting ideas of liberty and empire; their meanings and characters have shifted over tim...

15 Jun 38min

An American History of Purses

Today the US handbag market is estimated to be nearly $12 billion, with most of the purchasing done by women, but into the early 20th Century purses hadn’t yet become the nearly-exclusive domain of wo...

1 Jun 40min

The Lady Bird Special

On the morning of Tuesday, October 6, 1964, the Lady Bird Special, a 19-car train carrying First Lady Claudia “Lady Bird” Johnson, her supporters, members of the press, and a security detail, departed...

18 Mai 41min

Policing Slavery & Black Rebellion in the American South

Enslaved Africans were forcibly shipped to Virginia starting in 1619 in response to a severe labor shortage. From the beginning, enslaved laborers resisted by fleeing and through violence, and white e...

4 Mai 50min