Tag Archives: Canada

Mary Ann Shadd Cary

Among the items in the Black Abolitionists digital archive are hand-written speeches. The words of the speaker always offer insight into a perspective of history that is only left to use through text records. Yet when you add the actual handwriting, it seems to offer a connection to the writer herself in a more personal way. This speech by Mary Ann Shadd Cary is a great example....

Henry Bibb — Abolitionist

The story of Henry Bibb is fairly typical of a lot of Black Abolitionists. He was born into slavery in the early 1800′s at the peak of American slave holding, and he died before Emancipation. (His mother was a slave and his father was purported to be a wealthy plantation owner.) He sought out education illegally, witnessed his siblings sold to other plantations, and married young. He escaped slavery more than once, and established Canada’s first black newspaper The Voice of the Fugitive. He became an outspoken activist for abolition, fighting for freedom along side Frederick Douglass and William Wells Brown, and became one of the best known Black Abolitionists of his day....