11 Akbal
Blue Spectral Night
As Mercury
Turns retrograde
Day transfigures Night –
Spectral Night dissolves
To thirteen Moons
Of purposeful Dreaming
Abundant Intuition
Liberation from Dogma
Ascend the Heights of Soul
To seven Heavens of Light –
Transcend Consciousness
Let Nirvana unfurl.
Let Nirvana unfurl.
©Kleomichele Leeds
Mary Ann Shadd Cary
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.*
AKBAL
Kin 63: Blue Spectral Night
I dissolve in order to dream
Releasing intuition
I seal the input of abundance
With the spectral tone of liberation
I am guided by my own power doubled.
Within the single thought-form called "universe," there exists an infinite potential of structures and mediums of expression.*
*Star Traveler's 13 Moon Almanac of Synchronicity, Galactic Research Institute, Law of Time Press, Ashland, Oregon, 2018-2019.
The Sacred Tzolk'in
Sahasrara Chakra (Dali Plasma)
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