Alongside contemporaries like Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth, Shadd Cary(photo below) was a trailblazing anti-slavery activist, journalist, and lawyer who helped fugitive slaves escape to Canada and became the first Black woman publisher in North America.

However, many miss the fact that she was also an educator. Shadd Cary was born in 1823 in the free state of Delaware, where her abolitionist parents Abraham D. and Harriet Parnell Shadd ran their home as a station on the Underground Railroad. Delaware did not allow Black children to be educated, so when Shadd Cary was 10 years old, the family moved to Pennsylvania and sent their children to Quaker boarding school. This upbringing undoubtedly impacted Shadd Cary, who was seen as a rebel even in her own family of activists.

When Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, the largest wave of Black migration to Canada in the 19th century was set in motion. Feeling that refugees would need her services, Shadd Cary and her brother Isaac migrated to Canada, and the rest of her family soon followed.