Mary Ann Shadd Cary (1823–1893)
- Abolitionist Mary Ann Shadd Cary became the first female African American newspaper editor in North America when she started the Black newspaper The Provincial Freemen. Later in life, she became the second African American woman in the United States to earn a law degree.
- Shadd Cary was born into a free African American family. Her father worked for the abolitionist newspaper called the Liberator run by famed abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison and provided help to escaped enslaved people as a member of the Underground Railroad. Shadd Cary would grow up to follow in her father's footsteps.
Mum Bett (Elizabeth Freeman) (c. 1742–1829)
- Mum Bett was born enslaved circa 1742, spending her young adult years in the household of John Ashley in Massachusetts. When Ashley's wife attacked her, Betts appealed to a local abolitionist, who brought her case to the courts. Betts was granted her freedom and 30 shillings in damages in 1781, with the case Brom and Betts v. Ashley. Betts became a paid servant and raised a family on her wages.
Martin Robison Delany (1812-1885)
- Martin Robison Delany was born free in the slave state of Virginia. He and his siblings were taught to read by his mother who had to move them to Pennsylvania when this news was made public. He spent his life working to end slavery. He was a successful physician — one of the first African Americans admitted to Harvard Medical School — who used his influence to educate others about the evils of slavery with a number of abolitionist publications including the North Star with Frederick Douglass. He later served in the Civil War and was the highest ranking African American in the military up that point.
- Delany died of tuberculosis on January 24, 1885, in Wilberforce, Ohio. He has been described as a Renaissance man: publisher, editor, author, doctor, orator, judge, U.S. army major, political candidate and prison inmate (for defrauding a church), and the first African American to visit Africa as an explorer and entrepreneur.
William Lloyd Garrison (1805-1879)
- William Lloyd Garrison was an American journalistic crusader who helped lead the successful abolitionist campaign against slavery in the United States. In 1830, William Lloyd Garrison started an abolitionist paper, The Liberator. In 1832, he helped form the New England Anti-Slavery Society. When the Civil War broke out, he continued to blast the Constitution as a pro-slavery document. When the civil war ended, he, at last, saw the abolition of slavery.
Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896)
- Harriet Beecher was born into a family of ministers (father and 7 brothers) and social justice oriented sisters. Stowe achieved national fame for her anti-slavery novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which fanned the flames of sectionalism before the Civil War. Her emotional portrayal of the impact of slavery, particularly on families and children, captured the nation's attention. Embraced in the North, the book and its author aroused hostility in the South. UTC was her most famous work, but she continued to write and to champion social and political causes for the rest of her life.
Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906)
- Susan B. Anthony was a suffragist, abolitionist, author and speaker who was the president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association.
- Anthony grew up in a quaker family and developed a strong moral compass early in life and spent her life fighting for social causes.
- Champion of temperance, abolition, the rights of labor, and equal pay for equal work, Susan Brownell Anthony became one of the most visible leaders of the women’s suffrage movement. Along with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, she traveled around the country delivering speeches in favor of women's suffrage.
Frederick Douglass (c. 1818 – 1895)
- Frederick Douglass was an escaped slave who became a prominent activist, author and public speaker. He became a leader in the abolitionist movement, which sought to end the practice of slavery, before and during the Civil War. After that conflict and the Emancipation Proclamation of 1862, he continued to push for equality and human rights until his death in 1895.
- In 1847, Douglass began publishing his own abolitionist newsletter, the North Star. He also became involved in the movement for women’s rights. He was the only African American to attend the Seneca Falls Convention, a gathering of women’s rights activists in New York, in 1848.
Ida B. Wells
- Born in Mississippi into a family that instilled education, Wells was a prominent journalist, activist, and researcher, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In her lifetime, she battled sexism, racism, and violence. As a skilled writer, Wells-Barnett also used her skills as a journalist to shed light on the conditions of African Americans throughout the South and traveled all over the world to do it. She was unorthodox, and pissed off white women who wanted to vote, but said and did nothing about lynching’s.
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