Courage and Consequence — The Woman Who Did Not Ask Permission
1850. The Fugitive Slave Act. Federal marshals can seize a free Black northerner on a white claimant’s word. Her family runs the Underground Railroad in Delaware. They cannot stay. She crosses to Canada. Three years later she founds the first newspaper in North America edited by a Black woman. Ten years after that she crosses back into the country that drove her out — not to fight, to recruit Black soldiers for the Union Army. She did neither act with permission. The state of Indiana had to issue her a letter of safe passage so she would not be arrested in transit. Her newspaper vanished from public memory until a graduate student found bound issues at the University of Pennsylvania library a century later. She broke the editorial ice for Black women in America, and helped fill a regiment the Union Army could not have built without her. Mary Ann Shadd Cary needs to be remembered.
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