Mary Ann Shadd Cary

Mary Ann Shadd was born free in Delaware to activist parents who used their home as a station on the Underground Railroad. Following the passage of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, Shadd emigrated to Windsor, Canada West, establishing an integrated school for refugee children.

In March 1853, Shadd published the first edition of The Provincial Freeman in Toronto and Chatham, becoming the first Black woman in North America to edit and publish a newspaper. With her fearless masthead slogan "Self-Reliance Is the True Road to Independence," she advocated integration, temperance, and women's suffrage. She later earned a law degree from Howard University at age sixty.