SYMHC Classics: Mary Ann Shadd Cary

Revisiting our 2016 episode on black Canadian-American Mary Ann Shadd Cary, who became the first woman in North America to publish and edit a newspaper. She advocated against slavery, for better lives for free black people, and for women's rights.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. Not long ago, we got an email from
listener Daniel, who sent us a message about cliff diving
after hearing our episode on Sonora Webster Carver. I don't know,
we may have read this as a list of mail
at some point by the time this class it comes out,
but at the end of the message, Daniel gave us
a couple of episode suggestions, including mary Anne shad Carry.

(00:25):
We covered mary Ann shad Carry on the show in July,
so we're putting that episode back into our feet today
thanks to Daniel's email. Daniels, thank you for this suggestion.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello and welcome to the podcast.

(00:52):
I'm Tracy Vie Wilson and I'm Holly Frying and our
recent two parter on Harriet Tubman. We talked a little
bit about the Underground Railroad and it's northern terminus in
British North America, which would eventually become Canada, and we
talked a little bit about how Harriet Tubman herself and
the people that she guided there had kind of a
rough time when they got there, basically because they were

(01:14):
starting over from scratch, having just escaped from bondage, but
that is really only one aspect of the hardships that
escaped persons faced in Canada. And after those episodes came out,
we got a wonderful email from listener Derek, which we
are going to read at the end of this episode,
and in it he suggested today's subject for the show.

(01:35):
So today we are going to talk about Marianne Shad Carrie,
who was a black Canadian American who was the first
black woman in North America to publish an edit a
newspaper as well as a second black woman in the
United States to become an attorney. And aside from that,
she was also a teacher and a ceaseless advocate against
slavery and for better lives for free black people as

(01:58):
well as for women's rights. Uh and I had never
heard of her before getting Derek's letter me either, so hooray.
And mary Anne Shad Carry born Mary Anne Shadd had
a family history that tied to multiple previous podcast subjects.
Her great grandfather, Hans Shad which is spelled a little
bit differently, it's s c h A D instead of

(02:20):
s h A d D was a Hessian soldier. Her
great grandmother, Elizabeth, was one of two black women who
cared for him when he was injured near Philadelphia in
seventeen fifty five. Elizabeth and Hans married in January of
seventeen fifty six. Roughly twenty years later, they and their
children moved across the state line into Delaware, which, although

(02:41):
they were still all free, was a slave state. Over
the next couple of generations, Shad spelled s h A
D morphed into Shad s h A d D and
the family became a relatively prosperous free family of color
and a respected part of Wilmington, Delaware's free black community.
At the time, they would have been classified as mulatto's,

(03:03):
and most of the family worked in skilled trades and
skilled trades and made a pretty comfortable living. Maryanne Camberton
shed was the oldest of Harriet and Abraham Sheds thirteen children.
She was born on October nine of eighteen twenty three.
Her parents were abolitionists and were actively involved with the
Underground Railroad, and Abraham was also active in organizations trying

(03:26):
to improve the lives and legal protections of free black people,
including being a delicate to the Annual Convention for the
improvement of free people of color. When Marianne was born,
slavery had really been on the wayne in Delaware for
a while, and during her early life the vast majority
of Delaware's black population was free. However, Delaware was still

(03:50):
a slave state and concerned that its sizeable free black
population would inspire a revolt among those who were still enslaved.
This is why the states started passing a series of
so called Black codes, beginning not long after Marianne was born.
These codes were increasingly strict, impunitive, detailing detailing where Delaware's

(04:11):
black residents could congregate and be educated, where and whether
they could vote or hold public office. That answer was new.
It went on and on. Churches, schools, and public accommodations
were segregated, and many predominantly white churches stopped allowing black
members to attend. Educational opportunities for black children were severely lacking,

(04:35):
with the state not funding them and very few charities
and social organizations being willing to do it either. This
meant that Maryanne Sex put her doubly at a disadvantage.
There was one quote female African school in all of Delaware,
which failed when she was about seven and didn't reopen
again until she was out of her school age years.

(04:57):
All of this together meant that in the decade or
so after Marianne's birth, Delaware became an increasingly untenable place
for the Shad family to be living. So in eighteen
thirty three and they moved to Westchester, Pennsylvania, which would
later be home to recent podcast subject Buyard Ruston, with
the hope of finding a more humane place to live, and,

(05:18):
according to the family lure, one in which there would
be more educational opportunities for the family's children, particularly the daughters.
Pennsylvania was a free state and was in some ways
definitely better for the family than Delaware had been. However,
black people still couldn't vote and weren't represented in the government,
and the state was still home to racial tensions and

(05:39):
racial violence. For example, on August twelveth through the fourteenth
of eighteen thirty four, a white mob destroyed businesses and
at least forty homes in one of Philadelphia's black neighborhoods
following an argument on the eleventh at a carousel that
led to the rumors that black residents had insulted white residents.
Just aill that down a white mob destroyed a large

(06:03):
part of a black neighborhood based on the rumor of insults.
In case that was not quite clear enough, Marianne's father, Abraham,
worked as a shoemaker after they got to Westchester until
the family saved enough money to buy a small farm.
He continued his work as an activist, and the family
continued their work with the Underground Railroad. And although the
records are kind of spotty, it does seem that Marianne

(06:26):
was able to get an education through private Westchester schools.
Pennsylvania did have state supported public schools, but they were
unofficially not open to black children. And all of this
primed to lead Marianne into the adult life that she
would live. And we're gonna talk about that, but first
we're gonna pause really quickly for a word from one
of our fantastic sponsors. To get back to mary Anne

(06:56):
Chad as she was then, as we talked about before
the break, she had spent her earliest years in Delaware,
watching the state's black community become subject to increasingly harsh
black codes. She'd been raised by activist parents who wanted
their children to be educated, but did not have very
many schools available to them, especially when it came to
their daughters. So once she got the education that her

(07:19):
parents had worked so hard to secure for her, she
used it to educate people where she thought it was needed, most,
which began back in Delaware. From there, she also went
on to teach in Norristown, Pennsylvania and Trenton, New Jersey
through the eighteen forties. Being a teacher at a school
for black children was extraordinarily difficult during this time, whether

(07:39):
the school was in a free state or a slave state.
In general, either by custom or by specific law, state
funded schools were for white children only, and the states
offered little to no funding for schools for black children.
The charities running schools for black children were generally doing
so on almost no money in places like church basements.

(08:02):
Keeping schools for black children afloat required an extended network
of mutual aid societies, small businesses, and charities, all pulling
together to keep them funded, staffed, and equipped. The teachers,
most of whom were black women, worked for exceptionally low
pay and virtually no job security. Schools ran out of
money and closed down frequently, which was one of the

(08:23):
reasons that Shadd taught in so many different places. All
of this was in addition to increasing levels of discrimination, segregation,
and racist violence that grew in the wake of increasing
numbers of free black people moving to the North. Nonetheless,
she had acquired about a decade of teaching experience by
the time she wrote a letter to Frederick Douglas in

(08:44):
January of eighteen forty nine. He had asked for suggestions
on how to make real positive changes in the lives
of free black people living in the North. Shad's letter,
which was published in Douglas's anti slavery newspaper, The North Star,
criticized free black activists, including herself, for spending too much
time talking and debating at conventions and not enough time

(09:07):
on effective action. We should do more, she wrote, and
talk less. One of the things Shad would do for
the next few years was teach. In eighteen fifty one,
she moved to New York City to teach at a
school formed by the Society for the Promotion of Education
among Colored Children. Not long after, she heard about a

(09:27):
Great North American anti slavery convention to be held in Toronto,
which she decided to attend. By this point, escaped slaves
had established several communities in Canada, particularly along a border
with the United States in Canada West, which is now Ontario.
These communities had become sort of test cases for self
sufficiency and uplift strategies within the evolutionist movement. After discussing

(09:53):
the challenges and issues that were faced both in the
United States and in Canada, several of the delegates to
this meeting came to the conclusion that immigration to Canada
was the best way to ensure self sufficiency and equality
for the United States black population. There was still racism
in Canada, but the theory was that it would be
easier for black newcomers to Canada to achieve true equality

(10:17):
in that nation which didn't have slavery and established discriminatory laws.
So it's sort of this idea that, Okay, we can
move to Canada and kind of start fresh and have
a better shot at true equality than we do in
the United States. This was not a new idea at all.
Various people in organizations, both black and white and operating

(10:39):
with a whole range of philosophies and goals, had been
advocating the idea of resettling freed slaves for decades. Marianne's
father Abraham had actually been an advocate against this idea
at the time, largely focused on resettlement to Africa during
his years of activism before Marianne's birth and into her
early life. There were deafly a lot of different motivations

(11:02):
and points of view that people had for this idea
of resettlement to Africa. There were there were African American
leaders who were like, Okay, we should move and we'll
have a better chance there, and then there were also
people that were working from a more like white nationalist
point of view who were like, we should move the
black people out of our country back to Africa. Like

(11:23):
you can't boil down that, uh, that whole movement into
just one perspective, because there were a lot of different
people working towards the same goal from vastly different points
of view. Abraham, for example, felt that black people had
a constitutional right to live full, free lives in the
United States, so he was against the idea of resettlement

(11:45):
to Africa at all. Marianne, on the other hand, found
the arguments that she heard at this eighteen fifty one
meeting really appealing, and within days she had decided to
move to Canada to address one of the issues that
had been brought up at this meeting that was facing
Canada West's communities, and that was a lack of opportunity
for education. She moved to Windsor, just over the border

(12:07):
from Michigan on the Detroit River to open a school,
and the school was housed in a barracks left over
from the War of eighteen twelve. Shad was a huge
believer in integration. She wanted to encourage integrated communities of
equals rather than separate, segregated cities and facilities for black residents.
So she wanted her school to admit anybody that wanted

(12:28):
to learn. Tuition was a shilling a week, but she
promised not to turn away someone because they couldn't pay. This, however,
proved to be an enormously difficult promise to keep. She
very quickly found twenty five students, but twenty of them
were too poor to afford the tuition, and she was
sure that there were lots of other potential students in
Windsor who just couldn't afford to attend school at all

(12:51):
because they needed basically to work, even though they were children,
to bring in the money for their family. So when
the small number of students that she had that could
pay their tuition, there just wasn't enough to make ends meet.
Within months, Shad was living on charitable donations and money
her family sent her from home, and she doubted her

(13:12):
ability to keep the school heated in the oncoming Canadian winter.
She finally applied to the American Missionary Association, which was
hiring teachers for mission schools in Canada, to ask for funds.
After some reluctance on the a m a's part, she
was finally granted a hundred and twenty five dollars a
year that was half of what she said the school

(13:32):
would need to stay running, and soon her students numbered
twenty three children in the day and ten adults at night.
Once she was in Ontario, Shad proved herself to be
a really contentious figure. In June of eighteen fifty two,
she published a pamphlet entitled A Plea for Immigration or
Notes of Canada West and its Moral, social and political

(13:55):
aspect with suggestions respecting Mexico, West Indies and Vancouver's Land
for the information of Colored Immigrants. This was a forty
four page document primarily detailing information about Canada West's economy, politics,
Agriculture and Society. Notes of Canada West was basically promotional material,

(14:15):
maybe even propaganda, for the idea of immigration to Canada.
It definitely hyped Canada's advantages and glossed over its downsides.
This pamphlet exacerbated an already festering disagreement with Henry and
Mary Bibb. Henry Bibb was one of Canada's most prominent
Black leaders. It was actually the Bibbs who had encouraged

(14:38):
Shadd to come to Windsor in the first place. Notes
of Canada West set Shad up as the foremost authority
on what life was like for black immigrants to Canada,
which meant that Henry Bibb had been upstaged, and he
had been upstaged by a woman. Shad and the Bibbs
also fundamentally disagreed about how life for black immigrants should

(14:59):
be supported in Canada. Henry Bibb ran a settlement organization
called the Refugee Home Society or RHS, which solicited their
nations of both money and goods, and redistributed land. Shad
thought of this as begging. She strongly believed that the
black community needed to be self sufficient and not rely
on cast off clothing and second hand donations, and she

(15:21):
also suspected mismanagement in the RHSS finances. Aside from their
differences of opinion, Shad was direct and even aggressive when
she criticized people in organizations. Sometimes her writing was flecked
with sarcasm as well. So these disagreements blossomed into a
full blown feud, and this feud went on until the

(15:42):
summer of eighteen fifty two, when a cholera epidemic in
Windsor drew people's attention to more urgent matters. However, even
though it's sort of was diverted from existing, this feud
did have consequences for Shad and it's wake. The American
Missionary Association BO had not to fund her anymore once
her contract was up at the school, citing that she

(16:04):
had a lack of evangelical views. This was in spite
of the fact that they that they had just reviewed
her work and called it quote full and satisfactory a
month before she wound up closing her school on March
eighteen fifty three. The day after the school closed, the
first issue of The Provincial Freeman, a newspaper Chad largely wrote, edited,

(16:27):
and produced was published, and we're going to talk about
her new career as a newspaper editor. But first we
are going to pause one more time for a word
from one of the great sponsors that keeps us going.
When mary Anne Shad learned her contract with the American

(16:48):
Missionaries Association was not going to be renewed, she began
working on a newspaper. She wanted a publication that could
counter the viewpoints expressed in the Voice of the Fugitive,
which the Bibs were involved. Apart from the fact that
her disagreement with the Bibbs played out in part when
letters and columns published in the Voice of the Fugitive,

(17:08):
this newspaper also published editorials on women's role in the world.
These were editorials that promoted the very Victorian view of
women's domesticity. This was not a view that she agreed
with at all. She enlisted the help of experienced newspaper
editor Samuel ringold Ward. However, Ward's name was mostly for

(17:29):
the sake of name recognition and to shield the publication
from sexism. His direct involvement was pretty minimal, though, since
he lived in Toronto, which was more than three d
and fifty miles away. That first issue of The Provincial
Freeman was something of a prototype, and it would be
a while before there were regular issues that came out.
Although one of her goals had been to publish opinions

(17:52):
counter to those that were in the Voice of the Fugitive,
this actually turned out to be unnecessary. That publication folded,
not after all of its presses were destroyed in a
fire in late eighteen fifty three. The Provincial Freeman began
regular publishing on March eighteen fifty four, which was one
year after the publication of that initial issue. It's still

(18:14):
listed some of the same names on the masthead and
that new year later issue, but Shad was still doing
pretty much all the editorial work. Soon the paper was
being published every Saturday, and it featured editorials written by Shad,
articles picked up from other anti slavery and religious publications,
and local news and politics, and particular as was relevant

(18:36):
to black residents of Canada. Among the topics it covered,
UH the debate about mass immigration of black residents of
the US and whether it was better to stay in
the US and fight for equal rights there, UH, the
progress of the abolitionist movement in the United States and
its failure to have achieved nationwide abolition, and the hypocrisy
of legislators who adopted an anti slavery platform because it

(18:59):
was politically advantageous where they lived, not because they actually
believed that slavery was evil. It also published a lot
of work on women's rights. For this newspaper's entire existence,
Shad would aggressively try to raise raise funds to keep
it afloat. She actually went on a fundraising tour. This
was the first of many, and it was at this

(19:21):
point that she could no longer effectively hide the fact
that she was the one who had been editing it
behind the scenes this whole time. Apart from her being
its public spokesperson on the tour, the number of unsigned
editorials that the paper was publishing dropped really dramatically while
she was away, and they were replaced by notes on
her travel around Canada, which were under the byline M. A. Shad.

(19:43):
It was not hard to put two and two together.
It's a very simple math on that one. Uh. In
August of eighteen fifty four, someone wrote a letter to Mr. M. A.
Shad which praised the newspaper and the ingenuity of the
colored man who published it. At this point, Marianne, having
grown increasingly frustrated that people didn't know that it was

(20:03):
a woman running the paper, published a biting response under
her own full name. She dropped the pretense of Samuel
Ward's editorship and removed his name from the masthead on
the October eighteen fifty four issue. From this point, Chad
increased her touring and speaking schedule to try to raise funds,

(20:23):
and she gradually more put more trust than other people
to keep the paper running while she was away. One
of these people was her sister Amelia. Although Shad's father
had been generally opposed to immigration of the black community
out of the United States after the passage of the
Fugitive Slave Law of eighteen fifty, most of her family
had gradually moved to Canada, primarily for their own safety.

(20:47):
Several of her other siblings eventually worked on the paper
as well. Shadd resigned from editing the Provincial Freeman in
June of eighteen fifty five, believing that sexism was at
the root of its failure to thrive. It had barely
broken even in spite of her relentless fundraising. She also
moved it to Chatham, which is between Lake Erie and
Lake St. Clair, taking a three month hiatus for the

(21:09):
relocation and re establishment of their offices. They weren't entirely
welcome in Chatham, though, an existing paper in that part
of Canada West, the Kent Advisor, published an editorial claiming
that Chatham's black population had a hefty criminal element and
that a black newspaper would probably promote lawlessness. The town

(21:30):
itself was also racially very divided. Its population was about black,
and churches and schools were segregated, and the local papers,
as as evidenced by the thing I just said, had
no qualms about publishing blatantly racist work. Not long after
Shad and her newspaper moved to Chatham, Chad was drawn

(21:50):
into a dispute that shared a lot of similarities with
her earlier dispute with the Refugee Home Society. A one thousand,
five hundred acre settlement known as Dawn was home to
a black community, but its leaders and the people administrating it,
including British abolitionist John Scobell, had been suspected of mismanagement
and extortion. Scobel and Shad had butted heads before, and

(22:13):
they once again had a public dispute, in which Shad
wrote a series of letters in the paper. This dispute
over who should have financial control over Dawn went on
until the eighteen sixties and ultimately ended in a lawsuit
that allowed its black residents to take over controlling it themselves.
In Chatham, Shad spent a lot of time investigating and

(22:34):
reporting on suspected wrongdoing among Canada's abolitionist community. She uncovered
corruption among aid organizations and ferreted out white abolitionists who
had been putting funds raised for the cause to their
own personal use. In October of eighteen fifty five, she
attended the Colored National Convention in Philadelphia as one of

(22:55):
only two women present and the only one from Canada.
She was Ad did to the convention as a delegate
after a vote of thirty eight to twenty three. Although
Frederick Douglas and many of the other convention organizers were
against mass immigration of the United States Black community to
other nations, Shad gave a really forceful speech in favor

(23:16):
of relocation to Canada. Even though so many of the
other delegates were really opposed to the message of her speech.
A lot of people praised the speech itself and her
speaking ability, and this led to several other speaking engagements
while she was in Philadelphia. One of these was a
debate on the subject of immigration, in which Shad was
declared the winner. On January three of eighteen fifty six,

(23:40):
mary Anne Shad married Thomas F. Carey in St. Catharine's
at the home of her sister Amelia. He had three
children from a previous marriage, and Carrie had been an
early investor in Marianne's newspaper. They did not have a
particularly conventional marriage. She continued to speak and to work
as an activist and to raise money of the Freeman,

(24:01):
and the two of them never had a home together.
It would actually be six months before mary Anne Shadd
became mary Ann shad Carry in print. In late eighteen
fifty seven, after the birth of Shad Carry's first child,
the newspaper briefly stopped publishing new issues. It's not entirely
clear when publication resumed, because the issues weren't numbered, and

(24:24):
physical copies of them haven't survived until today, but the
newspaper was not the only thing she was working on
at this point. In April of eighteen fifty eight, John
Brown visited Canada West to try to raise support for
an armed slave insurrection he hoped to rally in North America.
Shad Carry wasn't at the meeting of supporters he attended.
There women weren't allowed, but later on William Wells Brown

(24:47):
wrote that if she had been a man, she probably
would have been with him at Harper's Ferry. I think
John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry has come up in
enough episodes know we probably should do one on it.
Mary Anne shad Carrey's last existing editorial in the Provincial
Freeman ran on June eighth, eighteen fifty nine. In it,

(25:07):
she spoke out against the rise in quote Negro haters
in Canada West. The last issue of the paper came
out within a few months after that. Shad Carey's husband
died on November eighteen sixty, at which point she was
pregnant with their second child. Although shad Carey had never
stopped working during their marriage, her income wasn't enough to

(25:29):
look after herself and her children. She wound up having
to get support from her family to make ends meet,
and she went back to teaching at a school so
underfunded that she eventually had to ask the refugee Home
Society for funding. That name rings a bell. It's because
that was the one of the organizations she had such
a public feud with. I can only she seems like

(25:52):
such a an exacting and proud person. I can only
imagine how desperate her surcumstances must have been to go
to an organization whose views she disagreed with so vehemently
to ask them for The Civil War started not long after,

(26:14):
and that sparked fears that the United States would try
to annex Canada, or that the South would win the
war and escaped slaves in Canada would be extradited back there.
Within Canada, the racial climate was becoming increasingly hostile as
well as the black population increased. The Canadian government had
originally really encouraged escaping slaves to come to Canada. They

(26:36):
had offered assistance through things like land grants as well,
But as more and more enslaved people and free black
people left the United States for Canada, that really started
to change. There was this increasing amount of not in
my backyard style opposition to attempts to settle in various
parts of Canada. In the face of all of this,

(26:59):
shad carry eased back on her opposition to immigration to
Africa and asked the American Missionary Association if she might
get a missionary appointment in Africa. That was denied. In
December of eighteen sixty three, she became a recruiter for
the Union Army. She began that in Chatham before going
to Indiana to continue the effort there as well as

(27:20):
to help escaping slaves get to Canada. Once the war
was over and slavery was abolished in the United States,
a lot of previous black immigrants to Canada decided to
return back home. This was eventually true of several people
from the shadd family as well. Shad Kerry eventually closed
her school and several of her family moved back to

(27:41):
the United States. She was really reluctant to follow them, though,
and was actually issued a Canadian passport in eighteen sixty five.
She finally returned to the United States after the passage
of the fourteenth Amendment, which she saw as a commitment
to the Reconstruction era policies that were intended to secure
real equality for the black population of the United States.

(28:03):
As you know if you have listened to our podcast
on Robert Small's that is not how that played out,
shad Carey moved to Detroit, where she became a teacher
and for the first time, got a job at a
public city school that she did not have to fund
through her own efforts. She became active in local politics,
and she began to advocate more strongly for labor rights

(28:26):
and the rights of women. Women's rights would be a
primary focus for the rest of her life. She eventually
moved to Washington, d C. Throughout reconstruction, she continued to
speak and write on all the various causes that she
was advocating, and then she joined the first law class
at Howard Law School in eighteen sixty nine. This is

(28:46):
a two year program, and if she had finished it
in two years, she would have been the first woman
to become an attorney in the United States. Shouldn't wind
up graduating with her class for reasons that aren't entirely clear,
although there's some so jestion that it might have been
because it was questionably legal for a woman to be
practicing law. She finally finished her law degree in eighteen

(29:07):
eighty three at the age of sixty, making her only
the second black woman in the United States to become
an attorney. In between She joined the suffrage movement, including
trying to register to vote in the spring of eighteen
seventy one, even though it was not legal for her
to do so, and for the rest of her life
she continually spoke, wrote, and advocated for equal rights for

(29:27):
black people and for women, slowing down only in the
last ten years of her life. She died of stomach
cancer on June five, at the age of sixty nine.
Frederick Douglas praised her as having quote unconquerable zeal and
commendable ability, but he also said, quote the tone of
her paper has been at times harsh and complaining. That

(29:52):
comes up again and again, like all all of these
biographical sources have commentary on her, her manner of writing
and speaking that boils down to like why does she
have to be so shrill? And number one, that's a
really gendered complaint that a lot of the same people

(30:12):
writing about it are like this. Probably she would not
have earned this criticism if she had been a man.
But then when I went and read a lot of
of pieces from the Provincial Freeman that still exists that
you can read online, I tried to pick ones that
seemed like she would be the maddest, like which ones
would she really be head up about and and like

(30:35):
say whatever things were making people say, Wow, she sure
is just cranky and her writing and I like, I
don't see it, so I think definitely, uh when you
when you read descriptions of her as being like a shrill,
complaining person, A lot of that does seem to boil
down to the fact that she was a woman while
saying these things, because had the same things been said

(30:57):
by a man, I don't think they would have raised
nearly as much comment about their tone. And now I
have the listener male that inspired this episode. This is
as we said from Derek, and Derek says, Dear Tracy
and Holly, I just finished listening to your fantastic double
episode about Harriet Tubman, and I was thinking about the
narrative of Canada as a sanctuary for escaped or even

(31:19):
emancipated slaves. I am Canadian, and I am a victim
of a lot of aggrandizing narratives about my country, which,
while painting us in a very kind light, are problematic
in terms of how we think of our identity. For example,
because of the fact that we talk about ourselves as
the terminus of the underground Railroad. We tend to absolve
ourselves of the same racist history as the United States.

(31:41):
In short, our cultural narrative places racism as a United
States problem. This I feel is dangerous in addition to
being historically inaccurate. As such, I was wondering if you
would be willing to explore Canada's role in the Underground
Railroad and black immigration Mary Anne Shad, for example, if
she was mentioned at all in history classes as the
nari of moving to Canada, starting the provincial Freeman, opening

(32:03):
an integrated school, and fighting for assimilation, Well, this is
a great narrative. It actually ignores the fact that Shadd,
like many other African American immigrants, experienced a tremendous amount
of racism in Canada. Shad documented this very well and
is this an interesting figure? I should say that I
remember reading this as a Canadian anthology of literature and
university cannot actually find examples of the racism that she experienced,

(32:26):
but I think it's worth investigation. I really do love
being Canadian, so I don't say this to be defamatory.
I'm a teacher who specializes in English language, arts and
social studies, and thus believe that complicating a national narrative
is the way that society can progress. I also understand
that you are an American podcast and that Canadian content
can con as we call it here, is something that

(32:48):
is not necessarily a concern for you as it is here. However,
I think that it ties into and complicates the story
of abolition and is often missed in Canadian history. Thank
you for reading, and sorry about using the word narratives
so much, and thank you for your podcast. I've learned
a lot from it, Derek, Thank you so much, Derek.
And just this letter is great for so many reasons.

(33:09):
Like number one, Uh, I literally never considered that ever
like me either in my ever crossed not at all. Uh.
And so number one having somebody point out a thing
that had never crossed either of our minds. Uh, It's
always really interesting, um because, like like Derek said, you

(33:31):
and I are both American and we have both grown
up with this narrative of the underground railroad is a
place where people wound up in Canada and everything was
better and that like better sure relatively speaking, probably better
than being enslaved, but definitely still a lot of racism present.
And then Mary Anne Shad Carrie herself is just an

(33:52):
incredibly complicated person. I feel like, as I often say,
we've only kind of scratched the surface here. Uh. There
was a lot of disagreement within the time about like
what was the best way for free black people and
people who had either been emancipated or emancipated themselves, Like

(34:12):
what was the best way to secure equality and secure, uh,
the the best life for people? And like, there was
just a lot of disagreement within like the black community
and within the white abolitionist community than also within like
the racist community. That was more of a like let's

(34:33):
just make everybody move to Africa to get them out
of our faces. Like that really was a driving thought
among people, and a lot of the things she was
advocating ruffled a lot of feathers for sure. So if
you would like to learn more about her, I strongly
recommend the book Mary Anne Shad Carry The Black Press
and Protests in the nineteenth Century by Jane Rhodes. It

(34:53):
gets into a lot more detail about things that we
didn't really touch on, various um beliefs that she had
old that you know, some of which people would totally
get behind today, and others people will be like, I'm
not sure I can support that idea. But she was
a really interesting and complicated person who was living in
a really interesting and complicated time that in a lot

(35:14):
of ways we tend to oversimplify when we're talking about
in history. So thank you again, Derek. That's like the
great email. That's a great example of a great email.
I literally stop what I was doing and forwarded at
the Holly who had already read it, to say, I
guess I know what I'm talking about next. Thanks so

(35:36):
much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode
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(35:57):
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(36:19):
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