Stuart Center

Join us this Sunday, February 19 at 7 pm Eastern (6p Central / 5p Mountain / 4p Pacific) for our Black History Virtual Prayer Service: “Enslavement, Dignity, Healing and Justice.”

We gather as a Sacred Heart family during Black History Month to pray in a special way for those women and men in our Province's own history who were enslaved by the Society, whose hands built the foundations of many of our institutions in the United States. We speak their names and pay tribute to their memory. We recognize the great debt owed to these individuals, their families, and their descendants – both a debt of gratitude for their immeasurable contributions, and a debt of repair for the grave sins committed against them by the Society. We recognize the ways in which this history continues to shape the truth of our present, and we pray for a renewed commitment to racial justice in our hearts, our communities, our institutions, our nation, and our world.

Learn more and register on our website: https://stuartcenter.org.

Today in "Unsung (S)heroes of Black History:"
Mary Ann Camberton Shadd Cary, 1823-1893

Called "one of the era's most insightful commentators,"* Mary Ann Shadd Cary spent her life in fierce advocacy for the abolition of slavery, women’s suffrage, and civil rights in both the United States and Canada. She was editor of the weekly newspaper “The Provincial Freeman,” a southern Ontario paper advocating equality, integration and self-education for Black residents of Canada and the United States.

Cary was born free in Delaware in 1823 to a family who was involved in the Underground Railroad assisting those fleeing slavery. She was educated in Pennsylvania and began a career as a teacher. After the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, she relocated to Canada along with her family, where she established herself as the country's first female newspaper publisher (and the first Black woman to publish a newspaper anywhere in North America). She returned to the United States during the American Civil War where she helped recruit soldiers for the Union Army and continued working for civil rights in a variety of arenas. She graduated from Howard University Law School at the age of 60, becoming the second Black woman in the United States to receive a law degree.

This , let us remember all those who chose "wearing out" over "rusting out" in order to make progress possible.




*Citation: Martha S. Jones, "Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All" (New York: Basic Books, 2020) -- in this book, Dr. Jones provides an excellent picture of the extraordinary contributions of Mary Ann Shadd Cary to the cause of civil rights.