Mary Ann Shadd Cary

She was a black Canadian-American 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 (00:01):
Welcome to steph you missed in history class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy B. Wilson and I'm Holly Frying and our
recent two partern on Harriet Tubman. We talked a little
bit about the Underground Railroad and it's northern terminus in

(00:24):
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 I got there, basically because they were
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,

(00:47):
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.
So today we're going to talk about Marianne Shad Carrie
was a black Canadian American who was the first black
woman in North America to publish an a newspaper, as
well as a second black woman in the United States

(01:09):
to become an attorney, and aside from that, she was
also a teacher and a ceaseless advocate against slavery and
four Better Lives for free Black people as well as
for women's rights. 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

(01:32):
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 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.

(01:53):
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 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

(02:14):
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 and most of
the family worked in skilled trades and skilled trades and
made a pretty comfortable living. Mary Anne Camberton Shad was
the oldest of Harriet and Abraham Shad's thirteen children. She

(02:38):
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 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 worn, slavery

(03:01):
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 a slave
state and concerned that it's sizeable free black population would
inspire a revolt among those who were still enslaved. This

(03:21):
is why the state started passing a series of so
called Black codes beginning not long after Marianne was born.
These codes were increasingly strict, impunitive, detailing where Delaware's black
residents could congregate and be educated where and whether they
could vote or hold public office. That answer was new.

(03:43):
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,
with the state not funding them and very few charities
and social organizations being willing to do it either. This

(04:04):
meant that mary Anne 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.
All of this together meant that in the decade or
so after mary Anne's birth, Delaware became an increasingly untenable

(04:27):
place for the Shad family to be living. So in
eighteen thirty three 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,
according to the family lure, one in which there would
be more educational opportunities for the family's children, particularly the daughters.

(04:48):
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
racial violence. For example, on August twelve through the fourteenth
of eighteen thirty four, a white mob destroyed businesses and

(05:09):
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 to boil that down, a white mob destroyed a
large part of a black neighborhood based on the rumor
of insults in case that was not quite clear enough.

(05:31):
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 was able to get an education through
private Westchester schools. Pennsylvania did have state supported public schools,

(05:54):
but they were unofficially not open to black children, and
all of this prime 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

(06:17):
Mary Anne 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

(06:40):
that her 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 the time,

(07:00):
whether 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.

(07:23):
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

(07:44):
reasons that Shad 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

(08:05):
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

(08:28):
on effective action. We should do more, she wrote, and
talk less. One of the things Chad 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

(08:48):
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

(09:15):
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

(09:38):
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

(10:00):
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.

(10:20):
There were definitely a lot of different motivations 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

(10:41):
out of our country back to Africa, like, you can't
boil down that whole 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

(11:02):
to live full, free lives in the United States, so
he was against the idea of resettlement to Africa at all. Maryanne,
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 black communities, and

(11:22):
that was a lack of opportunity for education. She moved
to Windsor, just over the border from Michigan on the
Detroit River to open a school, and the school was
housed in the 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,

(11:43):
segregated cities and facilities for black residents. So she wanted
her school to admit anybody that wanted 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

(12:04):
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 because
they needed basically to work even though they were children,
to bring in the money for their family. So with
the small number of students that she had that could
pay their tuition, there just wasn't enough to make ends meet.

(12:26):
Within months, Chad was living on charitable donations and money
her family sent her from home, and she doubted her
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

(12:48):
was finally granted a hundred and twenty five dollars a
year that was half of what she said the school
would need to stay running, and soon her students numbered
twenty three children in the day and ten adults at night.
While she was in Ontario, Shad proved herself to be
a really contentious figure. In June of eight fifty two,

(13:09):
she published a pamphlet entitled a Plea for Immigration 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 Immigrants. This was a forty four
page document primarily detailing information about Canada West's economy, politics, agriculture,

(13:32):
and society. Notes of Canada West was basically promotional material,
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

(13:52):
Mary Bibb. Henry Bibb was one of Canada's most prominent
black leaders. It was actually the Bibbs who had encouraged
Shad to come to wins Are 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

(14:16):
also fundamentally disagreed about how life for black immigrants should
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

(14:36):
black community needed to be self sufficient and not rely
on cast off clothing and second hand donations, and she
also suspected mismanagement in the RHSS finances assigned from their
differences of opinion, Shad was direct and even aggressive when
she criticized people in organizations. Sometimes her writing was flecked

(14:56):
with sarcasm as well. So these disagreements awsomed into a
full blown feud, and this feud went on until the
summer of eighteen fifty two, when a cholera epidemic in
Windsor drew people's attention to more urgent matters. However, even
though it sort of was diverted for from existing. This
feud did have consequences for Shad and it's wake. The

(15:19):
American Missionary Association voted not to fund her anymore once
her contract was up at the school, citing that she
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

(15:43):
first issue of The Provincial Freeman, a newspaper Chad largely wrote,
edited and produced, was published. And we're going to talk
about her new career as a newspaper editor. But first
we're going to pause one more time for a word
from one of the great sponsors that keeps us going. Story.

(16:06):
When Mary Anne Shad learned her contract with the American
Missionaries Association was not going to be renewed, she began
working on a newspaper. She wanted a publication that could
counter the viewpoints and expressed in the voice of the
Fugitive which the Bibbs were involved with. Apart from the
fact that her disagreement with the Bibbs played out in
part when letters and columns published in the Voice of

(16:28):
the Fugitive. This newspaper also published editorials on women's role
in the world. These are 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

(16:50):
was mostly for 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.

(17:10):
Although one of her goals had been to published opinions
counter to those that were in the Voice of the Fugitive,
this actually turned out to be unnecessary. That publication folded
not long 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

(17:31):
one year after the publication of that initial issue. It's
still 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

(17:52):
religious publications, and local news and politics in particular as
was relevant to black residents of Canada. Um Among the topics,
it covered 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

(18:12):
and its failure to have achieved nationwide abolition, and the
hypocrisy of legislators who adopted an anti slavery platform because
it 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,

(18:34):
Shad would aggressively try to raise raise funds to keep
it afloat. She actually went on a fundraising tour. This
is the first of many, and it was at this
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

(18:58):
she was away, and they were replaced by notes on
her travel around Canada, which under the byline M. A.
Shad 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

(19:21):
grown increasingly frustrated that people didn't know that it was
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 mass head
on the October fifty four issue. From this point, Chad
increased her touring and speaking schedule to try to raise funds,

(19:44):
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 message of the
Fugitive Slave Law of eighteen fifty most of her family
had gradually moved to Canada, primarily for their own safety.

(20:08):
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

(20:30):
relocation and re establishment of their offices. They were 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

(20:51):
itself was also racially very divided. Its population was about
twenty five percent black, and churches and schools were segregated,
and the local paper, 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 into a dispute that shared a lot

(21:13):
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 they once again had a public dispute,

(21:37):
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 reporting on suspected wrongdoing among Canada's abolitionist community.

(22:00):
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 only two women present and the only one from Canada.
She was admitted to the convention as a delegate after

(22:23):
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 of relocation
to Canada. Even though so many of the other delegates
were really opposed to the message of her speech. A

(22:44):
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, mary Anne Shad
married Thomas F. Carey in St. Catharine's at the home

(23:05):
of her sister Amelia. He had three children from a
previous marriage, and Carrie had been an early investor in
mary Anne's newspaper. They did not have a particularly conventional marriage.
She continued to speak and to work as an activist
and to raise money for the Freeman and the two
of them never had a home together. It would actually

(23:25):
be six months before mary Anne shadd became mary Anne
Shad Carrie in print. In late eighteen fifty seven, after
the birth of Shad Carrie'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 physical copies of them

(23:46):
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 Carey wasn't
at the meeting of supporters he attended. There women weren't allowed,

(24:07):
but later on William Wells Brown 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 episode I know
we probably should do one on it. Mary Anne Shad
Carrey's laughed. Existing editorial and The Provincial Freeman ran on
June eighth, eighteen fifty nine, In it, she spoke out

(24:29):
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
twenty nine, 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 look

(24:51):
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 under
did 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

(25:13):
such a an exacting and proud person. I can only
imagine how desperate her circumstances must have been to go
to an organization whose views she disagreed with so vehemently
to ask them for help. The Civil War started not

(25:34):
long after, 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

(25:56):
to Canada. They 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 two attempts to
settle in various parts of Canada. In the face of

(26:19):
all of this, 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

(26:41):
as well as 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 shad family as well. Shad
Carry eventually closed her tool and several of her family

(27:01):
moved back to the United States. She was really reluctant
to follow them, though, and was actually issued at 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

(27:21):
population of the United States. 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

(27:42):
became active in local politics, and she began to advocate
more strongly for labor rights 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 areous causes that she was advocating, and then she

(28:02):
joined the first Law class at Howard Law School in
eighteen sixty nine. This is 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 suggestion
that it might have been because it was questionably legal

(28:23):
for a woman to be practicing law. She finally finished
her law degree in eighteen 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

(28:44):
the rest of her life she continually spoke, wrote, and
advocated for equal rights for 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

(29:07):
quote the tone of her paper has been at times
harsh and complaining. That comes up again and again, like
all all of these biographical sources have commentary on her
her manner of writing and and speaking that boils down
to like, why does she have to be so shrill?

(29:28):
And number one, that's a really gendered complaint that a
lot of the same people 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,

(29:51):
like which ones would she really be head up about?
And and like say, whatever things we're making people say, Wow,
she sure is scranky 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

(30:12):
to boil down to the fact that she was a
woman while saying these things, because had the same things
been said by a man, I don't think they would
have raised nearly as much comment about their tone. And
now I have the listener Maal that inspired this episode.
This is as we said from Derek, and Derek says,
Dear Tracy and Holly, I just finished listening to your

(30:32):
fantastic double episode about Harriet Tubban, and I was thinking
about the narrative of Canada as a sanctuary for escaped
or even 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,

(30:53):
because of the fact that we talk about ourselves as
the terminus of the underground Yil Road, we tend to
absolve ourselves of the same says History as the United States.
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

(31:15):
railroad and black immigration. Maryann Shad, for example, if she
was mentioned at all in history classes, has a narrative
of moving to Canada, starting the provincial Freeman, opening an
integrated school, and fighting for assimilation, which 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.

(31:36):
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, 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

(31:57):
believe that complicating a national narrative is the way that
society can progress. I also understand that you were an
American podcast and that Canadian content can con as we
call it here, is something that 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,

(32:19):
and sorry about using the word narrative so much, and
thank you for your podcast. I've learned from it. I've
learned a lot from it. Derek, thank you so much. Derek,
I just this is the letter is great for so
many reasons, Like number one, Uh, I literally never considered
that ever, like me either in my not at all. Uh.

(32:42):
And so number one having to 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 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

(33:07):
better than being enslaved, but definitely still a lot of
racism present. And then Marianne Shad Carrie herself is just
an incredibly complicated person. I feel like, as I often say,
we've only kind of scratched the surface here. Um. There
was a lot of disagreement within the time about like
what was the best way for free black people and

(33:31):
people who had either been emancipated or emancipated themselves, Like
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, and then also within
like the racist community, that was more of a like,

(33:55):
let's just make everybody move to Africa to get them
out of our faces. Like that really as 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.

(34:16):
It gets into a lot more detail about things that
we didn't really touch on, various beliefs that she held 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 of ways we

(34:37):
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 stopped
what I was doing and forwarded at the Holly who
would already read it, to say, I guess I know
what I'm talking about. Next. Uh, if you would like
to write to us about this or any other podcast
where History podcast at how stuffworks dot com, russo on

(34:59):
Facebook at Facebook dot com slash miss in history, and
on Twitter at miss in history. Are Tumbler is miss
in History at tumbler dot com, Our Pinterest at pinterest
dot com slash miss in history, and our instagram is
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as consistent as possible for the ease of finding us
in all the places. If you would like to learn
more about what we have talked about today, you can

(35:19):
under our parents site, which is how stuff works dot com,
and you can put the word underground railroad in the
search bar and find an article on how the underground
mail road works or worked. You can also come to
our website, which is missing history dot com, where you
will find show notes for every episode that Holly and
I have ever worked on. You will find an archive
of every episode we have ever done. You will find

(35:40):
all the details about the book that I just referenced
then where you can learn more about it. You can
do all that and a whole lot more at how
stuff works dot com or missed in history dot com
For more on this and thousands of other topics. Is
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