Publisher teacher and lawyer. She was the first black woman publisher in North America and the first woman publisher in Canada. Shadd Cary was an abolitionist who became the first female African American newspaper editor in North America when she edited the Provincial Freeman in 1853.
Mary Ann Shadd was born in Wilmington, Delaware on October 9, 1823, the eldest of thirteen children of Abraham Doras Shadd (1801–82) and Harriet Burton Parnell. Abraham D. Shadd was a grandson of Hans Schad, alias John Shadd, a native of Hesse-Cassel who had entered the United States serving as a Hessian soldier with the British Army during the French and Indian War. The story goes that Hans Schad was wounded and left in the care of two African-American women, mother and daughter both named Elizabeth Jackson. The Hessian soldier and the daughter were married in January 1756 and their first son was born six months later.
A.D. Shadd was a son of Jeremiah Shadd, John's younger son, who was a Wilmington butcher. Abraham Shadd was trained as a shoemaker and had a shop in Wilmington and later in the nearby town of West Chester, Pennsylvania.
In both places he was active as a conductor on the Underground Railroad and in other civil rights activities, being an active member of the American Anti-Slavery Society, and, in 1833, named President of the National Convention for the Improvement of Free People of Colour.
When it became illegal to educate African American children in the state of Delaware, the Shadd family moved to Pennsylvania, where Mary attended a Quaker school. In 1840, after being away at school, Mary Ann returned to West Chester and established a school for black children. She also later taught in Norristown Pennsylvania and New York City.
Three years after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, A. D. Shadd moved his family to Canada, settling in North Buxton, Ontario. In 1858, he became the first black man to be elected to political office in Canada, when he was elected to the position of Counselor of Raleigh Township, Ontario.
Mary Ann traveled around Canada and the United States advocating for full racial integration through education and self-reliance. She promoted emigration to Canada amongst freemen, publishing A Plea for Emigration; or Notes of Canada West in Its Moral Social and Political Aspect: with Suggestions respecting Mexico West Indies and Vancouver's Island for the Information of Colored Emigrants in 1852.