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CELPIP Practice Reading: Reading for Information ID: #63089 Medium Mary Ann Shadd Cary: teacher, publisher and voice of Black refugees

Read the following passage.

A. Mary Ann Shadd was born in Wilmington, Delaware, in 1823. Her father, Abraham Shadd, was a prominent Black abolitionist. When she was ten, the family moved to West Chester, where she was educated at a Quaker boarding school. At 16 she organized a school for young Black people in Wilmington, and from 1839 to 1850 she taught at Black schools in several American cities. After the United States passed the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, many Black refugees fled north to Canada. Shadd moved to Windsor, Canada West, in 1851 and became a leader and spokesperson for these refugees.

B. In Windsor she opened a racially integrated school that taught children of both African and European descent, with support from the American Missionary Association. In 1852 she published A Plea for Emigration, a pamphlet encouraging Black Americans to move to Canada. She urged Black settlers to become part of Canadian society rather than live in separate settlements, and she objected to the Refugee Home Society's begging for funds. This put her in conflict with Henry Bibb, who was linked to the society and asked in his newspaper, the Voice of the Fugitive, why she had not made her funding known. In January 1853 the association withdrew its support for her school.

C. In March 1853, with help from the abolitionist Samuel Ringgold Ward, Shadd published the first issue of the Provincial Freeman. Ward only lent his name to attract interest and subscriptions. Shadd had no official title, but she was the driving force behind it, and she became the first woman of African descent in North America to publish a newspaper. Publication then stopped for a year while she gave lectures in the United States and Canada to raise money. From 1854 it appeared regularly in Toronto, and in 1855 it moved to Chatham. By 1859 the financial burden had grown too heavy, and it closed.

D. In 1856 Shadd married Thomas Cary, a Black businessman, and they had a son and a daughter. After the paper closed, she stayed on in Chatham, Ontario, where a plaque now honours her, and went back to teaching. Her husband died in 1860, and in late 1863, during the Civil War, she went back to the United States to work as an army recruiter. She later settled in Washington, D.C., where she taught and campaigned for women's right to vote. In 1883 she earned a law degree from Howard University, becoming one of the first African American women to do so.

E. Not given in any of the above paragraphs.

Decide which paragraph, A to D, has the information given in each statement below. Select E if the information is not given in any of the paragraphs.

- 1.
Most of the paper's buyers lived south of the border rather than in Canada.

- 2.
Her husband helped her to run the newspaper after they married.

- 3.
Pupils from different racial backgrounds were welcome at the school she set up in Windsor.

- 4.
Although a man's name was used to promote the paper, she was really the one running it.

- 5.
Before moving north, she had spent more than a decade teaching in American schools.

- 6.
After she had moved back to her home country, she gained a legal qualification.

- 7.
A change in American law caused many people escaping slavery to head for Canada.

- 8.
She did not support the idea of Black settlers living in communities of their own.

- 9.
A marker in an Ontario town recognizes her today.

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