Mary Ann Camberton Shadd Cary 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. She was also the second black woman to attend law school in the US. Mary Shadd edited The Provincial Freeman, established in 1853. Published weekly in southern Ontario, it advocated equality, integration and self-education for black people in Canada and the United States.
Racial equality is when people of all races and ethnicities are treated in an egalitarian/equal manner. Racial equality occurs when institutions give individuals legal, moral, and political rights. In present-day Western society, equality among races continues to become normative. Prior to the early 1960s, attaining equality was difficult for African, Asian, and Indigenous people. However, in more recent years, legislation is being passed ensuring that all individuals receive equal opportunities in treatment, education, employment, and other areas of life.
African American history started with the arrival Africans to North America in the 16th and 17th centuries. Former Spanish slaves who had been freed by Francis Drake arrived aboard the Golden Hind at New Albion in California in 1579. The European colonization of the Americas, and the resulting transatlantic slave trade, led to a large-scale transportation of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic; of the roughly 10–12 million Africans who were sold by the Barbary slave trade, either to European slavery or to servitude in the Americas, approximately 388,000 landed in North America. After arriving in various European colonies in North America, the enslaved Africans were sold to white colonists, primarily to work on cash crop plantations. A group of enslaved Africans arrived in the English colony of Virginia in 1619, marking the beginning of slavery in the colonial history of the United States; by 1776, roughly 20% of the British North American population was of African descent, both free and enslaved.
In the British colonies in North America and in the United States before the abolition of slavery in 1865, free Negro or free Black described the legal status of African Americans who were not enslaved. The term was applied both to formerly enslaved people (freedmen) and to those who had been born free.
Anna Julia Haywood Cooper was an American author, educator, sociologist, speaker, Black liberation activist, and one of the most prominent African-American scholars in United States history.
Henry Plummer Cheatham was an educator, farmer and politician, elected as a Republican member of the United States House of Representatives from 1889 to 1893 from North Carolina. He was one of only five African Americans elected to Congress from the South in the Jim Crow era of the last decade of the nineteenth century, as disfranchisement reduced black voting. After that, no African Americans would be elected from the South until 1972 and none from North Carolina until 1992.
Sarah Jane Woodson Early, born Sarah Jane Woodson, was an American educator, black nationalist, temperance activist and author. A graduate of Oberlin College, where she majored in classics, she was hired at Wilberforce University in 1858 as the first black woman college instructor, and also the first black American to teach at a historically black college or university (HBCU).
Religion of black Americans refers to the religious and spiritual practices of African Americans. Historians generally agree that the religious life of black Americans "forms the foundation of their community life". Before 1775 there was scattered evidence of organized religion among black people in the Thirteen Colonies. The Methodist and Baptist churches became much more active in the 1780s. Their growth was quite rapid for the next 150 years, until their membership included the majority of black Americans.
Black schools, also referred to as "Negro schools" and "colored schools", were racially segregated schools in the United States that originated in the Reconstruction era after the American Civil War. They were created in Southern states under biracial Republican governments as free public schools for the formerly enslaved. All their students were blacks. After 1877, conservative whites took control across the South. They continued the black schools, but at a much lower funding rate than white schools.
The civil rights movement (1865–1896) aimed to eliminate racial discrimination against African Americans, improve their educational and employment opportunities, and establish their electoral power, just after the abolition of slavery in the United States. The period from 1865 to 1895 saw a tremendous change in the fortunes of the black community following the elimination of slavery in the South.
The Colored National Convention of 1855 was a colored convention event held on October 16, 17, and 18 at Franklin Hall in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It consisted of delegates from Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Canada.
The American Teachers Association (1937-1966), formerly National Colored Teachers Association (1906–1907) and National Association of Teachers in Colored Schools (1907–1937), was a professional association and teachers' union representing teachers in schools in the South for African Americans during the period of legal racial segregation in United States. In 1954 the United States Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that segregation of public schools was unconstitutional. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 ended legal segregation.
Harriet Forten Purvis was an African-American abolitionist and first generation suffragist. With her mother and sisters, she formed the first biracial women's abolitionist group, the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society. She hosted anti-slavery events at her home and with her husband Robert Purvis ran an Underground Railroad station. Robert and Harriet also founded the Gilbert Lyceum. She fought against segregation and for the right for blacks to vote after the Civil War.
E. Belle Mitchell Jackson was an American educator, activist, small business owner, and abolitionist from Danville, Kentucky. Mitchell was one of the founders of the Colored Orphans Industrial Home in Lexington, Kentucky.
Adella Hunt Logan was an African-American writer, educator, administrator and suffragist. Born during the Civil War, she earned her teaching credentials at Atlanta University, an historically black college founded by the American Missionary Association. She became a teacher at the Tuskegee Institute and became an activist for education and suffrage for women of color. As part of her advocacy, she published articles in some of the most noted black periodicals of her time.
Sattira 'Sattie' Douglas was an American abolitionist and educator. An African American organizer, she helped form and lead multiple committees and clubs in Chicago and the West. Douglas traveled to Kansas near the end of the American Civil War, where she took up teaching freedmen and women, who had recently escaped slavery.
Jeremiah Burke Sanderson was an American abolitionist, and advocate for the civil and educational rights of black citizens in the United States. Growing up in New Bedford, Massachusetts, Sanderson in his early life was surrounded by the work of notable abolitionists, including Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, William Lloyd Garrison, and William Nell. These influences, combined with his studies of literature, philosophy, and history enabled him to become an eloquent spokesperson for black rights in the United States.
Judith Ann Carter Horton was an educator, librarian, and community leader who founded the first public library for African Americans in Oklahoma.
Black Canadians migrated north in the 18th and 19th centuries from the United States, many of them through the Underground Railroad, into Southwestern Ontario, Toronto, and Owen Sound. Black Canadians fought in the War of 1812 and Rebellions of 1837–1838 for the British. Some returned to the United States during the American Civil War or during the Reconstruction era.
Margaret Briggs Gregory Hawkins, worked as a schoolteacher and later became known for her activism on behalf of African Americans and women. She was inducted into the Maryland Women's Hall of Fame in 2021.
