Our blog tracks Jose Arguelles' Dreamspell Calendar. "As chaos and confusion rise, galactic consciousness based on the Law of Time serves as planetary medicine, lifting us into the awareness that we exist within a higher, more expanded realm of existence than the world of third-dimensional form and appearance. Daily practice will elevate consciousness and increase experiences of synchronicity." (Arguelles)
Beverly Smith (born December 16, 1946) in Cleveland, Ohio, is a Black feminist health advocate, writer, academic, theorist and activist who is also the twin sister of writer, publisher, activist, and academic, Barbara Smith. Beverly Smith is an instructor of Women's Health at the University of Massachusetts Boston.
She was one of three authors of the famous Combahee River Collective Statement, "one of the most widely read discussions of Black feminism," which was developed by members of the radical, lesbian black feminists of the Combahee River Collective in 1977. Her essays and articles on racism, feminism, identity politics and women's health have been extensively published in the United States.
Selected works
Periodicals
Conditions Five, The Black Women's Issue, November 1979
Conditions Four, Smith, Barbara, and Beverly. I Am Not Meant to be Alone and Without You Who Understand: Letters From Black Feminists, 1972-1978, Winter 1978
Sinister Wisdom - various issues
Barbara Smith and Beverly Smith, "The Varied Voices of Black Women", Sojourner (magazine), October 1978.
Ms. Magazine - various issues
Aegis Journal, 1983, "Some Thoughts on Racism"
Anthologies
Smith, Beverly. "The Wedding", in Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, 1983, ed. Barbara Smith, Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press
Combahee River Collective Statement, authored with Barbara Smith and Demita Frazier
Smith, Barbara & Beverly. "Across the Kitchen Table: A Sister-to-Sister Dialogue", in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (eds), CherrÃe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, Persephone Press, 1981.
Smith, Beverly. "Black Women's Health: Notes for a Course", in But Some of Us are Brave: Black Women's Studies, Hull, Gloria T., Scott, Patricia Bell, Smith, Barbara (eds), The Feminist Press, 1982. ISBN 0-912670-95-9
Smith, Beverly. "Face-to-Face, Day-to-day — Racism Consciousness Raising", A conversation with Tia Cross, Freada Klein & Beverly Smith, in But Some of Us are Brave: Black Women's Studies, Hull, Gloria T., Scott, Patricia Bell, Smith, Barbara (eds), Feminist Press, 1982. ISBN 0-912670-95-9
Smith, Beverly. "Choosing Ourselves: Black Women and Abortion", in From Abortion to Reproductive Freedom: Transforming a Movement, ed. Marlene Gerber Fried, South End Press, 1990, p. 86.*
Margaret Sloan-Hunter (May 31, 1947 – September 23, 2004) was a Black feminist, lesbian, civil rights advocate, and one of the early editors of Ms. magazine.
Early life
Margaret Sloan-Hunter was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee on May 31, 1947. She grew up in Chicago.
Career
At the age of 14, Sloan-Hunter joined the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), a group that worked on poverty and urban issues on behalf of the African-American community in Chicago. When she turned 17, she founded the Junior Catholic Inter-Racial Council, a mix of suburban and inner-city students who talked about and worked on racial problems. In 1966, Sloan-Hunter worked with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and in the "Open Housing Marches".
Margaret Sloan-Hunter paired up with Jane Galvin-Lewis, another former writer of Ms. Magazine, to challenge racism and sexism as interlocking oppressions. In order to become further involved, Sloan-Hunter and Galvin-Lewis paired up with Florynce Kennedy in 1973 to speak on college campuses around the Country. Their events became places for other black feminists to find each other and create support groups. This led Sloan-Hunter, Kennedy, and Galvin-Lewis to create the NBFO or National Black Feminist Organization in Kennedy's living room. Within the NBFO, many women worked to define the specific oppression black women face.
Sloan-Hunter also became one of the first editors of Ms. Magazine, a magazine supporting the feminist movement. In addition to serving as an editor for the magazine, she traveled to speak on issues of sexism and racism throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe.
Through the National Black Feminist Organization (NBFO), Sloan-Hunter tackled some of the same racial and feminist issues she tackled in her youth. In 1975, she and her daughter Kathleen Sloan moved to Oakland, California, where they established the Women's Foundation. She also helped organize the Berkeley Women’s Center and the Feminist School for Girls. Sloan-Hunter was an intersectionality activist, fighting for African American, feminist, and lesbian causes.
Margaret Sloan-Hunter published a book of poetry called Black & Lavender in 1995. Black & Lavender was a series of thirty-eight poems written about Sloan-Hunter's life.
Education
Margaret Sloan-Hunter won many awards for public speaking in high school. Margaret Sloan-Hunter went on to Chicago City College and Malcolm X College to major in speech. After this, she received a degree in Women’s Studies at Antioch University in San Francisco.
Death
Margaret died in Oakland, California when she was 57 years old. On September 23, 2004, her family confirmed she faced a prolonged illness.
Tracy Denean Sharpley-Whiting (born 1967) is a feminist scholar and Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Distinguished Professor of French in the Department of French and Italian at the Vanderbilt University College of Arts and Science. She is also the Director of African American and Diaspora Studies as well as the W. T. Bandy Center for Baudelaire and Modern French Studies. She is editor of The Speech: Race and Barack Obama's "A More Perfect Union", and editor of the academic journal Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International.
Michael Eric Dyson has described her as "a rising star among black public intellectuals" and "one of the country's most brilliant and prolific racial theorists". Sharpley-Whiting was named one of the top 100 young leaders of the African American community by The Root, an online magazine founded by scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. She received the 2006 Horace Mann Medal from Brown University. The award is given annually by the Brown Graduate School to an alumnus or alumna who has made significant contributions in his or her field, inside or outside of academia. Sharpley-Whiting received the Ph.D. in French Studies from Brown in 1994. Her book, Pimps Up, Ho's Down: Hip Hop's Hold on Young Black Women, received the Emily Toth Award for the Best Single Work by One or More Authors in Women's Issues in Popular and American Culture in a specific year from the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association. In September 2007, Sharpley-Whiting testified before Congress at the hearing, From Imus to Industry: The Business of Stereotypes and Degrading Images. She serves on the Executive Council of the Modern Language Association.
Single authored books
Sharpley-Whiting, Tracy Denean (1998). Frantz Fanon conflicts and feminisms. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield. ISBN 9780847686391.
Sharpley-Whiting, Tracy Denean (1999). Black Venus: sexualized savages, primal fears, and primitive narratives in French. Durham, N.C: Duke University Press. ISBN 9780822323402.
Sharpley-Whiting, Tracy Denean (2002). Negritude women. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ISBN 9780816636808.
Sharpley-Whiting, Tracy Denean (2007). Pimps up, ho's down: hip hop's hold on young Black women. New York: New York University Press. ISBN 9780814740644.
Edited and co-edited books
Sharpley-Whiting, Tracy Denean; Leitch, Vincent B; Cain, William E; Finke, Laurie A; Johnson, Barbara E; McGowan, John; Williams, Jeffrey J (2010). The Norton anthology of theory and criticism. New York London: W.W. Norton & Co. ISBN 9780393932928.
Sharpley-Whiting, Tracy Denean (2009). The speech: race and Barack Obama's "A more perfect union". New York: Bloomsbury. ISBN 9781596916678.
Sharpley-Whiting, Tracy Denean (Translator); Nardal, Paulette (Author) (2009). Beyond negritude : essays from Woman in the city. Albany: SUNY Press. ISBN 9781438429465.
Sharpley-Whiting, Tracy Denean; James, Joy (2000). The Black feminist reader. Oxford, UK Malden, Mass: Blackwell. ISBN 9780631210078.
Ntozake Shange (October 18, 1948 – October 27, 2018) was an American playwright and poet. As a Black feminist, she addressed issues relating to race and Black power in much of her work. She is best known for her Obie Award-winning play, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf. She also penned novels including Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo (1982), Liliane (1994), and Betsey Brown (1985), about an African-American girl run away from home. Among Shange's honors and awards were fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and Lila Wallace Reader's Digest Fund and a Pushcart Prize. In April 2016, Barnard College announced it had acquired Shange's archive. Shange lived in Brooklyn, New York.
Early life
Shange was born Paulette Linda Williams in Trenton, New Jersey, to an upper-middle-class family. Her father, Paul T. Williams, was an Air Force surgeon, and her mother, Eloise Williams, was an educator and a psychiatric social worker. When she was eight years old, Shange's family moved to the racially segregated city of St. Louis. As a result of the Brown v. Board of Education court decision, Shange was bussed to a white school where she endured racism and racist attacks.
Shange's family had a strong interest in the arts, encouraging her artistic education. Among the guests at their home were Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Chuck Berry, and W. E. B. Du Bois. From an early age, Shange took an interest in poetry. While growing up with her family in Trenton, Shange attended poetry readings with her younger sister Wanda (now known as the playwright Ifa Bayeza). These poetry readings fostered Shange's interest in the South in particular, and the loss it represented to young Black children who migrated to the North with their parents. In 1956, Shange's family moved to St. Louis, Missouri where Shange was sent several miles away from home to a non-segregated school which allowed her to receive "gifted" education.
When Shange was 13, she returned to Lawrence Township, Mercer County, New Jersey, where she graduated from Lawrence High School. In 1966 Shange enrolled at Barnard College at Columbia University in New York City. During her time at Barnard, Shange met fellow Barnard student and would-be poet Thulani Davis. The two poets would later go on to collaborate on various works. Shange graduated cum laude in American Studies, then earned a master's degree in the same field from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. However, her college years were not all pleasant. She married during her first year in college, but the marriage did not last long. Depressed over her separation and with a strong sense of bitterness and alienation, she attempted suicide. In 1971, having come to terms with her depression and alienation, Shange changed her name. In Xhosa, Ntozake means "she who has her own things" (literally "things that belong to her") and Shange means "he/she who walks/lives with lions" (meaning "the lion's pride" in Zulu).
In 1978, Shange became an associate of the Women's Institute for Freedom of the Press (WIFP). WIFP is an American nonprofit publishing organization. The organization works to increase communication between women and connect the public with forms of women-based media. In 2003, Shange wrote and oversaw the production of Lavender Lizards and Lilac Landmines: Layla's Dream while serving as a visiting artist at the University of Florida, Gainesville.
Shange's individual poems, essays, and short stories have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, including The Black Scholar, Yardbird, Ms., Essence Magazine, The Chicago Tribune, VIBE, Daughters of Africa, and Third-World Women.
Relationship to the Black Arts Movement
The Black Arts Movement—also known as BAM—has been described as the "aesthetic and spiritual sister of the Black Power concept." The Black Arts Movement is a subset of the Black Power Movement. Larry Neal described the Black Arts Movement as a "radical reordering of the western cultural aesthetic." Key concepts of BAM were focused on a "separate symbolism, mythology, critique, and iconology" as well as the African American’s desire for "self-determination and nationhood." BAM consisted of actors, actresses, choreographers, musicians, novelists, poets, photographers and artists. Though male artists such as Amiri Baraka heavily dominated the Black Arts Movement, some notable women writers of the movement were Gwendolyn Brooks, Nikki Giovanni, Rosa Guy, Lorraine Hansberry, Lucille Clifton, and Sonia Sanchez, among others. Although Shange is described as a "post-Black artist," her work was decidedly feminist whereas BAM has been criticized as misogynistic and "sexism had been widely and hotly debated within movement publications and organizations." Corresponding with the idea that art from BAM was a "radical reordering of the western cultural aesthetic," Shange herself described her atypical writing style. Regarding her plays, she stated: "A play has a form that has to be finished. A performance piece has an organic form, but it can even flow. And there doesn’t have to be some ultimate climax in it. And there does not have to be a denouement."
Though Shange's work did have a "radical reordering of western cultural aesthetic" with its spelling, structure, and style, Baraka—one of the leading male figures of the movement denied her as a post-Black artist. Referring to Shange as a part of the black aesthetic and as a post-Black artist, he claimed: "that several women writers, among them Michelle Wallace [sic] and Ntozake Shange, like [Ishmael] Reed, had their own 'Hollywood' aesthetic, one of 'capitulation' and 'garbage.'" Shange described different styles of writing for different parts of the country. She stated: "There’s not a California style, but there are certain feelings and a certain freeness that set those writers off from those in the Chicago-St. Louis-Detroit tripod group…so that the chauvinism that you might find that’s exclusionary, in that triangle, you don’t find too much in California." Shange set her writing apart from the Black aesthetic of the Black arts movement by creating a "special aesthetic" for black women "to an extent." She claimed, "the same rhetoric that is used to establish the Black Aesthetic, we must use to establish a women’s aesthetic, which is to say that those parts of reality that are ours, those things about our bodies, the cycles of our lives that have been ignored for centuries in all castes and classes of our people, are to be dealt with now."
Death
Shange died in her sleep on October 27, 2018, aged 70, in an assisted living facility in Bowie, Maryland. She had been ill, having suffered a series of strokes in 2004, but she "had been on the mend lately, creating new work, giving readings and being feted for her work." Her sister Ifa Bayeza was quoted as saying: "It’s a huge loss for the world. I don’t think there’s a day on the planet when there’s not a young woman who discovers herself through the words of my sister."
Awards
NDEA fellow, 1974
Obie Award
Outer Critics Circle Award
Audience Development Committee (Audelco) Award
Mademoiselle Award
Frank Silvera Writers' Workshop Award, 1978
Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry, 1981 (for Three Pieces)
Guggenheim fellowship, 1981
Medal of Excellence, Columbia University, 1981
Obie Award, 1981, for Mother Courage and Her Children
Nori Eboraci Award
Barnard College, 1988
Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund annual writer's award, 1992
Paul Robeson Achievement Award, 1992
Arts and Cultural Achievement Award
National Coalition of 100 Black Women (Pennsylvania chapter), 1992
Taos World Poetry Heavyweight Champion, 1992, 1993, 1994
Living Legend Award, National Black Theatre Festival, 1993
Claim Your Life Award
WDAS-AM/FM, 1993
Monarch Merit Award
National Council for Culture and Arts
Supersisters trading card set (one of the cards featured Shange's name and picture), 1979[27]
Pushcart Prize
St. Louis Walk of Fame inductee [28]
Proclamation of "Ntozake Shange Day" (Borough of Manhattan, New York) by Congressman Charles Rangel on June 14, 2014.[29]
Nominations
Tony Award, 1977
Grammy Award, 1977
Emmy Award nominations (all for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf)
Works
Plays
for colored girls who have considered suicide/ when the rainbow is enuf (1975). Nominated for a Tony Award, Grammy Award, Emmy Award; first published 1976; updated 2010 with a new section, "Positive" (Scribner).
A Photograph: Lovers-in-Motion (1977). Produced Off-Broadway at the Public Theater.
Where the Mississippi Meets the Amazon (1977).
A Photograph: A Study of Cruelty (1977).
Boogie Woogie Landscapes (1979). First produced at Frank Silvera's Writers' Workshop in New York, then on Broadway at the Symphony Space Theatre.
Spell #7 (written spell #7) or spell #7: geechee jibara quik magic trance manual for technologically stressed third world people (1979). Produced Off-Broadway at Joseph Papp's New York Shakespeare Festival Public Theater.
Black and White Two Dimensional Planes (1979).
Mother Courage and Her Children (1980). Produced off-Broadway at the Public Theater. Winner of a 1981 Obie Award.
Three for a Full Moon (1982).
Bocas (1982). First produced at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles.
From Okra to Greens/A Different Kinda Love Story (1983).
Three views of Mt. Fuji (1987). First produced in San Francisco at the Lorraine Hansberry Theatre; first New York production at the New Dramatists.
Daddy Says (1989).
Whitewash (1994).
Poetry
Melissa & Smith (1976).
Natural Disasters and Other Festive Occasions (1977)
Nappy Edges (1978)
A Daughter's Geography (1983)
From Okra to Greens (1984)
Ridin' the Moon in Texas: Word Paintings (St. Martin's Press, 1987)
The Love Space Demands (a continuing saga) (St. Martin's Press, 1987)
A Photograph: Lovers in Motion: A Drama (S. French, 1977)
Some Men (1981)
Three Pieces (St. Martin's Press, 1992)
I Live in Music (1994)
The Sweet Breath of Life: A Poetic Narrative of the African-American Family (Atria Books, 2004). Photography by Kamoinge Inc.
"Enuf"
"With No Immediate Cause"
"you are sucha fool"
"People of Watts" (first published November 1993 in VIBE Magazine)
"Blood Rhythms"
"Poet Hero"
Wild Beauty (Atria Books, 2017)
Novels
For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf (Shameless Hussy Press, 1976)
Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo (1982)
Betsey Brown (St. Martin's Press, 1985)
The Black Book (1986, with Robert Mapplethorpe).
Liliane (1994)
Some Sing, Some Cry (2010) (with Ifa Bayeza)
Children's books
Coretta Scott (2009)
Ellington Was Not a Street (2003)
Float Like a Butterfly: Muhammad Ali, the Man Who Could Float Like a Butterfly
Daddy Says (2003)
Whitewash (1997)
Essays
See No Evil: Prefaces, Essays & Accounts, 1976–1983 (1984)
Mary Ann Shadd Cary (October 9, 1823 – June 5, 1893) was an American-Canadian anti-slavery activist, journalist, 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.
Early life
Mary Ann Shadd was born in Wilmington, Delaware, on October 9, 1823, the eldest of 13 children to Abraham Doras Shadd (1801–1882) and Harriet Burton Parnell, who were free African-Americans. 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. 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 in Philadelphia.
While growing up, Mary Ann's family's home frequently served as a refuge for fugitive slaves; however, 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 Boarding School. In 1840, after being away at school, Mary Ann returned to West Chester and established a school for black children. She also 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.
Social activism
When the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 in the United States threatened to return free northern blacks and escaped slaves into bondage, Shadd and her brother Isaac moved to Canada and settled in Windsor, Ontario, across the border from Detroit. This is where Shadd's symbolic effort to create free black settlements in Canada began. While in Windsor, she founded a racially integrated school with the support of the American Missionary Association, published a pamphlet called, "Notes on Canada West," which was a plea for emigration and discussed the benefits, as well as the opportunities, for blacks in the area, and she also ran an anti-slavery newspaper called The Provincial Freeman, which made her the first female editor in North America. Isaac managed the daily business affairs of the newspaper and would host gatherings to plan the raid on Harper's Ferry.
In Jane Rhodes' biography, Mary Ann Shadd Cary: The Black Press and Protest in the Nineteenth Century, Rhodes noted that Cary was one of the first to advocate that African-Americans leave the United States and emigrate to Canada. Her newspaper operated from 1853 until 1860 providing strong editorial commentary, cultural events, and news from other locations. Cary, born free to free parents helped slaves escape using the Underground Railroad. She published her newspaper in Canada, but it also circulated in major northern cities across the United States.
By observing the black press movement of this era in which publishers used the press to uplift their race, much can be gleaned from this period of history. These were the first newspapers to address African-Americans instead of whites. They portrayed African Americans as intellectually sound and capable of appreciating culture and education. The publications provided African Americans with a means to embrace their own political destinies. Cary, the first African-American woman to publish and own a newspaper distributed in North America, founded The Provincial Freeman in 1853. She published the final edition in 1861, just before the Civil War broke out in America. Although white abolitionist newspapers featured articles against slavery primarily based on religious tenets, they did not offer African-Americans the opportunity to express themselves on its pages. Historians have pointed out that these newspapers' archives are not complete, although they do offer the best insight into the minds of African-Americans during this time. These newspapers included poetry, letters, travelogues and more.
African American newspapers sought to uplift the race and to change the perception that white Americans held about former slaves. "Black community leaders stressed that education, strong moral values, honest labor, thrift, and so forth would change the erroneous beliefs that whites held concerning Blacks' inferiority. Essentially, this meant the ascent from ignorance to literacy." Cary and Douglass both used their papers to promote this line of thinking.
The role of African-American newspapers from 1850-1860 leaves much to be discovered. The mere fact that these newspaper owners were able to buy and operate equipment to produce weekly publications during a period when no one held a journalism degree or had any formal training is astonishing. Moreover, it is astounding that African Americans, many of whom were former slaves, were able to produce newspapers when few of their contemporaries could read or write.
Historians believe that these publications, which portrayed African–American leaders and their reactions to the political crises in the United States, are the only ones in existence. Mainstream newspapers, even those with abolitionist views, did not include comments from minorities. Still, historians maintain that Cary's and Douglass' newspapers were read not only by other African Americans but by Caucasians as well. In fact, Carol B. Conaway writes in "Racial Uplift: The Nineteenth Century Thought of Black Newspaper Publisher Mary Ann Shadd Cary," that these newspapers shifted the focus from Whites to Blacks in an empowering way. She writes that Whites read these newspapers to monitor the dissatisfaction level of the treatment of African Americans and to measure their tolerance for continued slavery in America.
These newspapers used their mainstream counterparts as models for their newspapers. According to research conducted by William David Sloan in his various historical textbooks, the first newspapers were about four pages and had one blank page to provide a place for people to write their own information before passing it along to friends and relatives. He goes even further in discussing how the newspapers during these early days were the central source of information for society and culture.
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.
She attempted to participate in the 1855 Philadelphia Colored Convention, but the assembly debated whether to even let her sit as a delegate. Her advocacy of emigration made her a controversial figure and she was only admitted by a slim margin of 15 votes. According to Frederick Douglass' Paper, although she gave a speech at the Convention advocating emigration, she was so well-received that the delegates voted to give her ten more minutes to speak. However, her presence at the Convention was largely edited from the minutes, probably because she was a woman.
Civil War and postbellum activism
In 1856, she married Thomas F. Cary, a Toronto barber who was also involved with the Provincial Freeman. She had a daughter named Sarah and a son named Linton. After her husband died in 1860, Shadd Cary and her children returned to the United States. During the Civil War, at the behest of the abolitionist Martin Delany, she served as a recruiting officer to enlist black volunteers for the Union Army in the state of Indiana. After the Civil War, she taught in black schools in Wilmington, before moving to Washington, D.C., where she taught in public schools and attended Howard University School of Law. She graduated as a lawyer at the age of 60 in 1883, becoming only the second black woman in the United States to earn a law degree. She wrote for the National Era and The People's Advocate and in 1880, organized the Colored Women's Progressive Franchise.
Shadd Cary joined the National Woman Suffrage Association, working with Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. She testified before the Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives and becoming the first African-American woman to vote in a national election.
She died in Washington, D.C., on June 5, 1893, from stomach cancer. She was interred at Columbian Harmony Cemetery.
Legacy
Mary Ann Shadd Cary's former residence in the U Street Corridor was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1976. In 1987 she was designated a Women's History Month Honoree by the National Women's History Project. In 1998, Mary Ann Shadd Cary was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame. She was also honored by Canada, being designated a Person of National Historic Significance. In 2018 the New York Times published a belated obituary for her.*
