Black Women Lawyers Led as Suffragists

As the ABA continues to celebrate the anniversary of the 19th Amendment and the vital importance of the right to vote, we profile two Black women lawyer suffragists who played a significant role.

Mary Ann Shadd Cary

Mary Ann Shadd was born in 1823 to free parents. She was raised in Delaware but was educated in Pennsylvania at a Quaker school. When she was 16, she began teaching. In 1850, the Fugitive Slave Act was passed, giving slaveowners the right to recover escaped former slaves. The act sparked a migration wave and Mary's family moved to Windsor, Canada, where many Black Americans were settling.

In Canada, Mary started a racially integrated school. She also began a weekly antislavery newspaper called The Provincial Freeman. Although the newspaper was really her brainchild and she wrote or edited most of its articles and ran the business side of it, the names of two male colleagues appeared on the masthead instead of her name, a common occurrence at the time. Despite doing the bulk of the work, and teaching school, she managed to keep the paper afloat for four years.

In 1856, Mary married Thomas Cary, the owner of several barbershops. They had a daughter, Sarah; then, in 1860, Thomas died while Mary was pregnant with their son. As a single mother facing financial hardship, Shadd Cary took a job recruiting soldiers for the Union during the Civil War.

After the war, Shadd Cary returned to the United States and taught in black schools in Delaware and then in Washington, D.C.

She later enrolled at Howard University and graduated with an LL.B. from the Howard University Department of Law. Although there is some discrepancy about her year of graduation, Shadd Cary is recognized as one of the first Black law graduates in the country.

Though it is unclear if Shadd Cary ever practiced law, she put her degree to good use. In 1874, she was one of 600 suffragists who signed a petition and then testified before the U.S. House of Representatives' Judiciary Committee, advocating for a woman's legal right to vote, 42 years before the 19th Amendment was ratified. Shadd Cary also became a member of the National Woman Suffrage Association and then founded the Colored Women's Progressive Franchise Association. Shadd Cary died in 1893.  

Charlotte E. Ray

Charlotte E. Ray is frequently credited as being the first Black woman admitted to practice law in the country. Ray was born in New York City in 1850. Her father was a minister and abolitionist.

Ray was sent to Washington, D.C. to attend school. After graduating, she began teaching at Howard University in the Normal and Preparatory Department.

Some historians and scholars claim that Ray applied to Howard University's School of Law using her initials to disguise the fact that she was a woman. Others point out that the use of her initials is unclear and was unnecessary because Howard had a stated policy of accepting women at the time. Regardless, Ray graduated from law school in 1872.

Ray was admitted to the District of Columbia bar. She started her own practice but could not sustain it, likely due to prejudices of the time.

She became active in the suffragist movement, becoming a delegate at the 1876 conference of the National Woman Suffrage Association. In the 1880s, Ray returned to New York and became a teacher in Brooklyn.

Ray joined the National Association of Colored Women in 1895, which advocated for a wide range of reforms for Black women including the right to vote. Ray died in 1911 of bronchitis.