"Abraham Doras Shadd"(1801-1882)

Abraham the first Afro-Canadian to hold public office,was born in Wilmington,Delaware on March 2,1801.He was the grandson of a white German soldier from Hesse Kassel,Germany and a free black woman.Abraham was free born and earned respectable living as a shoemaker,supporting his wife and thirteen children.His passion,however,was obtaining civil rights for African Americans and later Afro-Canadians and he devoted his life to the abolitionist movement which sought the immediate end of slavery.Although he favored abolition,he opposed the African Colonization Society because it proposed to send African Americans to Liberia.He believed instead that the future for blacks was in North American and argued that education,thrift,and hard work would enable African American to achieve equality.By the 1820s Abraham was a "conductor"on the Underground Railroad from his homes in Wilmington, Delaware and later West Chester,Pennsylvania.From those home fugitive slaves would travel the "railroad"to freedom in Canada.He hid escaping slaves and provided them with food,clothing,and guidance as they made their way north.He also continued his public activities on behalf of abolition.He was a member of the American Anti-Slavery Society headquartered in Philadelphia and in 1833 he was elected President of the National Convention for the Improvement of Free People of Colour.In the early 1850s he moved his family to southern Ontario's North Buxton area where they joined many of families he had helped guide to freedom.In 1859,at the age of 58,he became the first black man to to serve in Canadian public office when he was elected Counselor of Raleigh Ontario.Four of his children became prominent in their own right.Mary Ann Shadd (1823-1893),an educator,journalist, and lawyer,was the first black woman in North America to publish a newspaper.I.D. Shadd,after the Civil War,returned to the United States and served as a member of the Mississippi Legislature between 1871 and 1874;Abraham W.Shadd,a graduate of Harvard Law School,became prominent attorney in Noth Buxton and Emaline Shadd was one of the first women appointed to the faculty of Howard University in Washington D.C.