Mary E. Bibb

She established schools for Black Canadians, published the Voice of the Fugitive newspaper, and helped African Americans get settled in Canada.

The daughter of free black Quaker parents, she was born Mary Elizabeth Miles in Rhode Island around 1820.

[2][6] Education was pivotal for African Americans to rise above low-paying menial labor and domestic services—like bootblacks, washerwomen, and table waiters—that kept them in the low class.

[7] Fellow female evangelist Maria W. Stewart believed that education was important to break through whites' prejudicial perceptions of Blacks.

In 1854, Mary Ann Shadd Cary started the Provincial Freemen and edited it alongside Samuel G. Ward and Rev.

I soon found by a few visits, as well as by letters, that she possessed moral principle, and frankness of disposition, which is often sought for but seldom found.She became Bibb's second wife in June 1848.

With the publication of his narrative and the high-profile position as an anti-slavery lecturer, Henry Bibb was an easy target to be captured.

[2] Approximately 20,000 Black people settled in Canada between 1850 and 1860, hundreds of them coming through Sandwich on a daily basis,[13] needing food, clothing, and shelter.

[14] The Bibbs asked for financial help from abolitionist and philanthropist Gerrit Smith and the American Missionary Association to establish a school and a newspaper to communicate the conditions of Africans and their flight from slavery.

[16] Mary and Henry Bibb were leaders of the Refugee Home Society, which helped former slaves settle in Canada, providing them with land and building schools and churches.

[21] After the end of the Civil War, Cary returned to Washington, D.C., where he was a marshall at the Police Court and was a board of schools trustee.