Christian Olbey

This essay is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Barbara Christian.

On an afternoon in April 2000, one of the more remarkable convocation ceremonies of this year, or any year for that matter, took place at Antioch University’s graduation proceedings. The ceremony was noteworthy both for its choice of commencement speaker, Mumia Abu-Jamal (the former Black Panther Minister of Information currently sitting on death row in a US prison), and for the latter’s call to commit “class suicide” as the explicit theme of his address. Abu-Jamal states that this topic is in response to the graduating class’s “proposed query about an individual’s impact on the world” (Abu-Jamal and Kissinger 3). He names several figures (Nelson Mandela, Malcolm X, Ella Baker, W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, and Angela Y. Davis) who should appear on any “logical” list of people we admire for having impacted our world. Abu-Jamal then locates the common and decisive characteristic of these figures neither in race nor in their shared commitment to leftist politics.

The tie that binds these figures together is the fact that each, within his or her specific historical context, chooses the decisive practice of class suicide: “when you look at these people, you find folks who committed class suicide, who turned their backs on the acquired class advantages and potential opportunities to give voice and supportive presence to the most oppressed sectors of their society” (3). He fleshes out this thesis by explaining how each of these figures consciously sacrificed individual and material comforts, objects, and opportunities consistent with their privileged class location in order to work for the liberation Du Bois of the most oppressed groups, communities, and classes of their respective societies. “We admire these people,” says Abu-Jamal to this audience bursting at the seams with class privilege, “because at critical junctures of their lives, they cast their lot with the oppressed, the poor, the worker, or those in the third world” (4). C. Clark Kissinger notes that, at the end of the address, an audience of over a thousand “gave a prolonged standing ovation to Mumia’s remarks” (2). Although not specifically addressed to Black intellectuals and cultural producers, Abu-Jamal’s call does resonate with recent developments in Black Studies, as noted by Jeff Sharlett in his article “Taking Black Studies Back to the Streets.”

Sharlett speaks of a change in direction in what he calls the “new black studies,” which has turned away from preoccupation with what Manning Marable calls the “postmodern sensation within academe—‘esoterica’ that obscured the day to day brutalization of black people” (Marable qtd. in Sharlett 2). Confronting the hardly paradoxical fact that “while black studies was gaining legitimacy in the white world of academe, it was losing ground in the black communities from which it sprang” (2), Sharlett observes that the new Black Studies is re-orienting itself around much more activist lines and issues such as police brutality, the rise in incarceration rates, reparations for the descendants of slaves, and so on. “Key to the revitalized black studies of the last few years,” says Sharlett, speaking of work now appearing on black figures such as Ella Baker and Robert F. Williams (the Black militant who, in the 1950s, advocated armed self-defence against the Ku Klux Klan), “has been an emphasis not only on activism now and in the future, but also in the past” (Sharlett 5). I suggest that Abu-Jamal’s emphasis on class suicide and Sharlett’s identification of the progressive turn in black studies form an intersection of crucial importance to the further development of Black Canadian cultural studies. This essay takes advantage of the double emphasis on class suicide and the question of insurgent intellectual praxis to contribute to the recuperation of an early Black Canadian example of both in the figure of Mary Ann Shadd, the truly remarkable woman who carried the struggle against American slavery into the region of Canada West (south-western Ontario) during the explosive decade of the 1850s.

In a collaborative effort, bell hooks and Cornel West stress the crucial importance for contemporary Black liberatory movements to “remember, reclaim, re-vision, and renew” a history saturated with the titanic social struggles between the forces of oppression and liberation (9). Within the Black Canadian context, this practice of historical recuperation takes on added importance, since it addresses a fundamental elision of the presence of black people from the historical record of the nation. In recent years, this “elision” has begun to be addressed by a heterogeneous array of scholars and cultural workers from within and outside the Canadian academy. In this situation, I would argue it crucial that this collective effort build upon, yet go beyond, the sole objective of a nostalgic recuperation that, whatever the degree of factual density, would mark a limited contribution to contemporary forms of Black Canadian cultural politics.

The following discussion is therefore less preoccupied with the retrieval of Shadd as a static historical figure that we can then enshrine in a dimly lit, rarely visited museum that we call the nation’s past. Rather, my concern is with the re-presentation of this intellectual figure in motion, with trying to assess her intellectual praxis in its active and highly conflicting relation to both the dominant Canadian society and the fugitive community she served. This focus seizes on the figure of Shadd as a concrete historical example that contributes to an increased understanding of one of the many migrations that have formed the cultural category to which we now refer as Black Canadian. In addition, this effort also attempts to situate Shadd’s early Canadian cultural production to intervene in a variety of contemporary theoretical discussions which are concerned with questions of race, cultural identity (Black Canadian, African American, diasporic, andpPostcolonial), migrancy, and the relation between oppositional intellectual practice and class suicide. This method draws on Walter Benjamin, who, in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” advises cultural producers committed to social transformation “to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger” (255). In this context, Shadd’s cultural production, emerging in the firestorm of antebellum anti- slavery struggle and the rise of class contradictions within the Canadian fugitive community, provides a productive insight not only into her particular historical period, but into our own dangerous moment of contemporary transnational capitalist globalization and the pressures this historical development places on oppositional intellectual praxis.

hooks and West elaborate on their prescriptives for contemporary liberatory black movements, arguing that they should “remember first that the historical struggle for Black liberation was forged by Black women and men who were concerned about the collective welfare of Black people” (9). This concern for collective welfare is nowhere more evident than in the life and cultural work of Mary Ann Shadd. Born 9 October 1823 in Wilmington, Delaware, she was the eldest of Abraham and Harriet Shadd’s thirteen children, a family of free Blacks living in a slave state. Her exposure to political activism came quickly, since her father was a pioneering “conductor” and their house a “station” on the Underground Railroad, the famous clandestine network which developed to aid fugitive slaves escaping American slavery. In 1833, no doubt fearing for the safety of their large family as hostility and aggression against all expressions of abolitionism intensified, the Shadds moved to Pennsylvania, where Mary Ann was educated in a Quaker school. This formal education went hand-in-hand with one provided by the “realities of radical reform” activities (Bearden and Butler 17). In writing about Shadd, the great W.E.B. Du Bois describes her as

tall and slim, of that ravishing dream-born beauty, that twilight of the races we call mulatto, well educated, vivacious, with determination shining from her sharp eyes, she threw herself single-handed into the great Canadian pilgrimage, when thousands of black men [and women and children] hurried northward and crept beneath the protection of the lion’s paw. (Du Bois qtd. in Bearden and Butler 9)

Du Bois’s romantic description of Shadd’s physical characteristics is anything but superfluous. Her light skin colour, in the context of the colour/caste system practised by antebellum free Blacks, in conjunction with education and free-born status, all helped to establish Shadd as a member of the Black proto-bourgeoisie of her day. Presumably, this means that she had choices at her disposal other than to cast her lot with the most oppressed sector of her society. Du Bois finishes his description with an arresting image of the irrepressible intellectual activity of Shadd: “she became teacher, editor, lecturer; tramping afoot through winter snows, pushing without blot or blemish through crowds and turmoil to conventions and meetings” (qtd. in Bearden and Butler 9). As Abu-Jamal notes of the figures on his list, class suicide is a choice that often demands a sacrifice of the safety, security, and individual comforts of bourgeois existence, and this certainly appears to be the case for Shadd: “The reformer’s life of grinding stress—with its endurance of public invective, notoriety and physical danger—was the life she chose,” emphasize her biographers, “and she chose it knowingly” (Bearden and Butler 17).

Shadd enters the surviving cultural record in 1849 with the publication of her twelve-page pamphlet titled Hints to the Coloured People of the North in Wilmington, Delaware. The pamphlet was reviewed by Black radical Martin Delany, who described the author as “a very intelligent young lady, peculiarly eccentric,” and was referred to in Frederick Douglass’s North Star, which noted Shadd’s important identification of “black imitation of the conspicuous consumption of whites” as a serious contradiction to an emancipatory political project (Delany qtd. in Bearden and Butler 21). Writing to the free Black community of the northern states, Shadd targets the economic fragility of the antebellum Black proto-bourgeoisie. “We forget that we are, as a people, deficient in the ‘needful’ to support such things,” admonishes the brash twenty-six-year-old before posing a series of questions which set individual gratification in conspicuous consumption against the requirements for collective liberation: “what profits a display of ourselves? Is it to be seen by one another? How does that better our condition?” (Shadd qtd. in Bearden and Butler 21). Shadd’s rhetorical skill and intellectual focus are already in evidence as she shifts agency onto the reader by positioning her critique as a series of questions while retaining the opposition between collective welfare and individual gratification as the ultimate determination for any particular answer. Here she mobilizes a rhetorical strategy that allows her to make the crucial point (that individual Black agency expressed in the activity of conspicuous consumption siphons Black resources and energy from the collective sociopolitical objective of emancipation from US chattel slavery) while avoiding the antagonization of any particular relatively affluent black males, who, we should remember, possessed the power to exclude her voice from the cultural sphere of the anti-slavery newspaper. Nor should we limit the scope of Shadd’s critique here to the antebellum anti-slavery struggle, since, as Leslie Sklair notes of intellectual critique in our contemporary moment, “any attack on capitalist consumerism is an attack to the very center of global capitalism” (303).

Following this pamphlet, Shadd writes again, this time to North Star, and displays the sense of urgency and crisis which marks her cultural production during this period, insisting that northern and free Black people explicitly engage the social struggle for emancipation immediately and on their own “without waiting for the whites of the country” (Shadd qtd. in Bearden and Butler 21). Commenting on this letter, Bearden and Butler note that this “was an early delineation of a lifelong theme—independence and self-respect for the black race” (21).

Black people began arriving in Canada, as in America, more or less at the same time as Europeans. As was the case throughout the British empire, slavery itself was not officially abolished in Canada until an “Act of the Imperial Parliament [was] passed on August 28, 1833” (Winks 111). Between this date and the onset of the American Civil War, an immense number of Americans of African descent would choose to migrate north of the forty-ninth parallel into the area now known as southern Ontario. This migration increased with the intensification of American repression of its free Black population and the subsequent passing of the Fugitive Slave Bill into law in 1851. Jason Silverman explains that

the new Fugitive Slave Law virtually propelled thousands of blacks to Canada West, the very nature of the law, which stipulated that the owner of a fugitive slave could recover him either with the authorization of a warrant or “by seizing and arresting such fugitive,” threatened all Northern blacks, fugitive slave and free alike. (61)

The enactment of this law entailed an extreme homogenization in which all African Americans, whether fugitive slaves or free, were placed under the explicit threat of enslavement in the American South. Jeopardized by the US government’s capitulation to the powerful pro-slavery interests of the South, persons of African descent in America “looked northward to Canada West, where many of their fellows already lived under reasonably good conditions with all the power of English law behind them” (Bearden and Butler 22). As Bearden and Butler point out, it was the combination of geographic proximity and legal protection that made Canada a prime destination for escaping fugitives since, after crossing the forty-ninth parallel, “there was no extradition and once on British soil, a black—man, woman, or child—was miraculously a free human being with all the rights of any other migrant” (22).

During the early decades of the nineteenth century, Canada appears to have welcomed fugitives from American slavery, as evidenced in the following reply to a prospective group of fugitives seeking refuge from the imposition of the draconian “black codes” in Cincinnati. “Tell the Republicans on your side of the line that we do not know men by their color,” writes Lieutenant Governor Sir John Colborne to the prospective fugitives. “If you come to us, you will be entitled to all of the privileges of the rest of his majesty’s subjects” (Colborne qtd. in Winks 155–56). However, this initial welcome had much more to do with ongoing conflicts between America and Britain, the American Revolution and the War of 1812, and the desire to construct a national identity based on notions of British freedom set against what Shadd sometimes called “Yankee tyranny,” than with any lasting concern for the plight of human beings trapped under the threat of enslavement, or any actual desire to receive a substantial fugitive emigration. As the threat enacted in the Fugitive Slave Law made Black life in the northern states much more dangerous, the growing numbers and increasing visibility of fugitives began to strain the self-congratulatory “hospitality” of Canadians, and foregrounded the antagonism between the ideal of Black freedom and the reality of Black presence. Silverman, citing a letter printed in the Toronto Colonist newspaper in 1851, identifies this shift in Canadian public opinion: “ … we fear they are coming rather too fast for the good of the Province. People may talk about the horrors of slavery as much as they choose; but fugitive slaves are by no means a desirable class of immigrants for Canada, especially when they come in large numbers” (106).

Carefully noting these developments, and vitally concerned with the heated issue of black emigration, Shadd also looked northward and saw Canada as a country with tremendous political and economic potential for fugitives fleeing American slavery. By September 1851, Shadd had settled in Windsor, Ontario, and so began her cultural work in Canada as a Black woman intellectual tied organically to the bruised but hopeful, resilient and growing, fugitive slave community struggling to emerge into an increasingly hostile Canadian society.

Shadd first chose to settle in Windsor, Canada West (present-day southern Ontario), on the advice of prominent abolitionist figure Henry Bibb. Author of Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American Slave, Written by Himself, Bibb had achieved an international reputation within abolitionist circles and was a founding member of the Refugee Home Society and the publisher of the anti-slavery newspaper Voice of the Fugitive. Again reminding us of Abu-Jamal’s understanding of class suicide, Shadd writes that she came to Windsor, despite “the prospect of a good private school in Toronto,” because of Henry and Mary Bibb’s “account of the destitution of the people” (Shadd qtd. in Bearden and Butler 34). While the friendship between Shadd and the Bibbs appears to have begun on a promising note, the honeymoon was short-lived, and this early experience ignited a bitter feud between Shadd and Bibb that began over the vital issue of segregated schools. It was during this time that Shadd wrote the pamphlet A Plea for Emigration or Notes of Canada West in its Moral, Social, and Political Aspect with Suggestions Respecting Mexico, W. Indies and Vancouver Island for the Information of Colored Emigration, published in Detroit in 1852.

Her pamphlet was designed to circulate throughout the US, providing an accurate, factual assessment of Canada as the most advantageous site for fugitive migration. Written in Canada, the document engaged cultural battle in America by subverting pro-slavery propaganda which stressed that Blacks could not survive the harsh Canadian climate, work the unfamiliar soil, or fend off the British, who, they were told, would expropriate and exploit their labour even more severely than the slave owner. “The master tells [the slave],” explains Lewis Clarke in his slave narrative, that “if he goes to Canada the British will put him in a mine under ground, with both eyes put out, for life” (Clarke and Clarke 619). As Clarke and a host of slave narrators detail, the maligning of Canada by pro-slavery interests formed a significant ideological hurdle for slaves contemplating escape to Canada. Shadd identifies this ideological hurdle in the preface to her pamphlet, stating that the document is intended to satisfy the “increasing desire on the part of the colored people, to become thoroughly informed respecting the Canadas, and particularly that part of the province called Canada West.” She also indicates the urgent need for such an effort “since the passage of the odious Fugitive Slave Law has made residence in the United States to many of them dangerous in the extreme” (Plea iii).

In addition to the menacing descriptions of Canada, many of the White-led abolitionist organizations were endorsing schemes and projects for shipping emancipated slaves and free Black people to Africa. Shadd was among many Black abolitionists who believed this program to be not only explicitly racist but, more importantly, an attempt to severely curtail Black political agency in America. The note of urgency ringing throughout Shadd’s construction of fugitive migration stems from her profound sense of this crisis threatening the Black community. “The people are in a strait,” Shadd stresses in her preface, “on one hand, a pro-slavery administration, with its entire controllable force, is bearing upon them with fatal effect: on the other, the Colonization Society, in the garb of Christianity and Philanthropy, is seconding the efforts of the first named power.” To combat this twin offensive, she emphasizes that

information is needed—Tropical Africa, the land of promise of the colonizationists, teeming as she is with the breath of pestilence, a burning sun and fearful maladies, bids them welcome—she invites to moral and physical death, under a voluntary escort of their most bitter enemies at home. (Plea iv)

Exigency and crisis, combined with a courageous engagement of relentless critique—here, by aligning purportedly Christian and philanthropic organizations not with social movements for Black liberation but instead with Black people’s “most bitter enemies”—all mark abiding features of Shadd’s intellectual praxis. Emphasizing once more the necessity for migration, Shadd concludes her preface by returning to her stress on the importance to the prospective fugitive of factual information regarding Canada, the implication being that those abolitionist elements supporting African colonization were indeed complicit with the pro-slavery mystification of Canada. “Many look with dreadful forebodings to the probability of worse than inquisitorial inhumanity in the Southern States from the operation of the Fugitive Law,” writes Shadd in a pre-emptive defense of her efforts; “certain that neither a home in Africa, nor in the Southern States, is desirable under the present circumstances, inquiry is made respecting Canada” (Plea iv).

Although Shadd states her intention to restrict the pamphlet to “a statement of facts obtained in that country” (Plea 8), which leads to her focus on climate, geography, soil evaluations, and commodity prices, she anchors this utilitarian discourse in the political implications of fugitive migration:

Lands out of the United States, on this continent, should have no local value, if the question of personal freedom and political rights were left out of the subject, but as they are paramount, too much may not be said on this point. I mean to be understood as a description of lands in Mexico would probably be as desirable as lands in Canada, if the idea were simply to get lands and settle thereon. (Plea 8)

If the question of migration is restricted to the purely rudimentary sphere of physical and economic survival, Canada is, in effect, no better or worse than other options for fugitive migration. She remains well aware that to delimit the question in this way serves to legitimate the colonizationist support for Africa as the prime site for fugitive migration. By foregrounding the political implications of fugitive migration, Shadd effectively subverts the Anglo-American abolitionist argument for African colonization. She concludes this passage by linking the prospects of political freedom and equality to those of economic survival and nationality, arguing that “it is important to know if by this investigation we only agitate, and leave the public mind in an unsettled state, or if a permanent nationality is included in the prospect of becoming purchasers and settlers” (8). By introducing the prospect of a “permanent nationality,” Shadd advocates a fugitive cultural identity inconsistent with that of the exile awaiting the opportunity to return to the land of their birth. Instead, by weaving themselves into the fabric of Canadian society as “purchasers and settlers,” Shadd maintains that fugitives can exchange the passive identity of victim for the much more aggressive one of political activist. This explicit refusal to divorce “personal freedom and political rights” from the question of migration is what leads Shadd to engage the unavoidable confrontation with the subject of racism in Canada.

At this early moment in her Canadian experience, Shadd is remarkably optimistic about the prospect of unprejudiced relations between the fugitive migrants and the White Canadian population. “No man’s complexion affects his business. If a colored man understands his business, he receives the public patronage the same as a white man,” writes Shadd under the sub-heading “Labor—Trades”: “he [the fugitive] is not obliged to work a little better, and at a lower rate—there is no degraded class to identify him with, therefore every man’s work stands or falls according to merit, not as is his color” (Plea 16). Indeed, when Shadd does broach the topic of racism, under the sub-heading “Churches—Schools,” she offers an explicit indictment of Black, rather than White, racism. She observes that Black racism toward Whites is encouraged by the fugitive leadership’s insistence on segregated institutions (churches, schools, and segregated communities such as Josiah Henson’s Dawn settlement), contending that “their influence on colored people is fatal” (18). In the “bosom” of segregated institutions “is nurtured the long-standing and rankling prejudices, and hatred against whites, without exception, that had their origin in American oppression,” Shadd argues before strategically adding, “and that should have been left in the country in which they originated—’tis that species of animosity that is not bounded by geographical lines, nor suffers discrimination” (18).

The focus on Black racism serves several important functions in the pamphlet. First, keeping in mind the objective of encouraging fugitive migration, the detailing of White racism would, of course, deter the prospective migrant. Second, emphasizing the international distinction between Canada and America enables Shadd to situate the source of Black racism firmly within the national boundaries and Black experience of America. This striking and original move, then, serves to maintain a utopian element in her construction of Canada as a “promised land” unspoiled by American slavery. In addition, the focus on Black racism and its sources locates the potential for eliminating racism squarely within the subjective realm of the fugitives. This is a shrewd tactical move that promotes Black agency by underscoring the importance of the forty-ninth parallel as an international boundary not merely between nations but between entirely different modes of Black existence.

In America, there is little hope of successfully challenging, let alone eradicating, a racism whose source is entrenched, beyond the sphere of Black agency, in the series of laws and social relations stemming from almost four centuries of chattel slavery. However, on the other side of the line, in the absence of chattel slavery, what racism that exists does so outside the sphere of the law, in a zone that Shadd argues is firmly within the power of the fugitives themselves to eradicate. This construction of racism as a national characteristic, one that the fugitive escapes through the decision to exchange one national location for another, also promotes in a subtle way the repudiation of White racism by White Canadians themselves as part of their own rejection of American identity. Third, the emphasis on Black racism permits Shadd to launch her public attack on segregated institutions in general and, in particular, on the lucrative little power structure developed by Henry and Mary Bibb, ostensibly to serve the needs of the rapidly growing fugitive community. Shadd held that the Bibbs’ endorsement of segregated institutions had little or nothing to do with the collective welfare of the fugitive population and was, instead, linked directly to the financial windfall that they had accumulated in their positions as unquestioned leaders and public representatives of the fugitive community. Unquestioned, that is, until Mary Ann Shadd arrived on the Canadian scene.

It is a standing testament to her intellectual courage that it would take no longer than her first Canadian publication for Shadd to challenge the micro-hegemony of the powerful Henry Bibb. Shadd warns any missionary attempting to work in the fugitive community that

there are those who pretend to have been enlightened, and to have at heart the common good, whose influence and operations he will find designedly counteracting his conscientious efforts, the more effectively appealing to a common origin and kindred sufferings, secretly striking behind and bringing his character as a missionary, and his operations, into discredit in the eyes of a sympathizing Christian community. (Plea 19)

Of this passage Bearden and Butler note that Shadd “patently refers to influential members of the local black community, and with the phrase ‘common origin and kindred sufferings,’ particularly to five-time slavery escapee Henry Bibb” (Shadd qtd. in Bearden and Butler 56).

Historian Robin Winks views the conflicts between these two intellectual figures as symptomatic of the reasons for the limited successes of the Canadian anti-slavery movement. “Henry Bibb and Mary Shadd refused to cooperate to further the Negro cause and used their presses to attack each other. Ultimately an incredible variety of sensitivities, distractions, foolish quarrels, prideful hurts, and personal ambitions,” states Winks with detectable condescension, “held the anti-slavery forces back far more than in the United States, where manifestations of the same petty spirit were overridden by forces of much greater power” (261). On one hand, Winks makes a valid, though obvious, point. This obviousness did not escape the understanding of the fugitives themselves. As one reader wrote in a letter to Shadd as editor of The Provincial Freeman, the newspaper she established in Windsor in 1853, published in the 25 September 1854 issue:

“But oh!” say those sensitive ones, “you must not say anything against the doings of any of the anti-slavery people,” no matter what those doings may be, or however injurious to the interests you support. ”They are our friends” say they, and “we cannot afford to lose them.” Now, I am ready to admit, that it is always desirable to retain true friends, but those who profess to be, and at the same time show by their works that they are not, do not merit a consideration as such. (“Letter to Editor”)

On the other hand, these conflicting forces scorned by Winks as foolish quarrels and petty spirits can be more productively understood to prefigure what, after the Civil War and formal emancipation, would become a consistent obstacle for Black and other liberatory political movements. This interpretation of Shadd’s conflict with the Bibbs flows out of the focus on the crucial importance of class suicide and intellectual praxis within emergent Black liberatory struggles.

The schism between Shadd and the Bibbs began with her arrival in Windsor and was initially waged over the question of segregation in schools and other public institutions and facilities. Jane and William Pease note the struggles undertaken by African Americans to desegregate public institutions like transportation and churches, but insist that “nowhere was the effort more important than in schools” (144). Bibb endorsed segregation in schools and other institutions as the means through which fugitive Blacks could develop, spiritually, culturally, and financially, outside the sphere of White Canadian society. When ready, segregationists argued, fugitives could integrate more effectively into mainstream Canadian society. The struggle between Shadd and Bibb over segregation marks a distinctly Canadian expression of what had become a central conundrum of Black American anti-slavery struggle during the antebellum period, as identified by Pease and Pease:
Indeed, the debate over integration and segregation reflected the most fundamental dilemma which black activists faced. Should they strive for acceptance in white America or struggle to achieve a distinctive and separate culture? Should segregated facilities be viewed as an end in themselves or as a transition device and so be shaped to bridge white and black communities? How these questions were answered defined the nature of the struggle. (144)

In America, segregation was imposed on free people of African descent by a dominant society intent on enforcing a rigid racial hierarchy through social exclusion. Though integration and equal civil rights were usually required, this restricted social situation necessitated that free African Americans “act independently to improve their lot, and to shape their own institutions—press, schools, churches, businesses, and even anti-slavery societies” (Pease and Pease 98). Canada, however, lacked any legal or structural apparatus to enforce segregation. This meant that fugitive segregation in Canada would be voluntary, a self-imposition loathed by Shadd. Bibb’s program was supported by his abolitionist organization and further endorsed by the pertinent authorities, who, not surprisingly, also encouraged the separation between White Canadians and the growing fugitive population. Shadd, and later other prominent fugitive intellectuals such as Samuel Ringgold Ward, rejected such projects unconditionally, countering that the construction of “black utopias” based on segregated communities “merely postponed the day of integration rather than hastening it” (Winks 218). Writing of a meeting that took place to settle the school issue in Windsor, Shadd notes that she “stood alone in opposition to caste schools” (Shadd qtd. in Bearden and Butler 35).

The stand against segregation in all of its forms is one she would take repeatedly throughout her life, believing that all such manifestations, even if espoused to be temporary, only “retarded the goal of integration” (Winks 206). Her position on integrated schools was primarily one of principle, since few White Canadians were willing to allow their children to be educated alongside fugitives. Nevertheless, unwilling to accept Bibb’s segregationism, Shadd started her own school for the fugitives (children and adults), charging a minimal amount which her pupils were often unable to pay. Without the endorsement of the relatively powerful figure of Bibb, the school was perennially under financial pressure, although Shadd was able to keep it operating for a time through a moderately successful application to the American Missionary Association.

The segregation sought by the Bibb faction is buttressed by his deployment of a discourse of absolute difference. As Shadd writes, the proponents of institutional segregation

tend to make broad the line of separation they wish to make between them and the whites, and they are active … to perpetuate, in the minds of the newly arrived emigrant or refugee, prejudices, originating in slavery. Every casual remark by whites is tortured into a decided and effective negro hate. (Plea 33)

Whereas one might expect the Shadd critique to settle on White racism as the major hurdle to be cleared by newly arriving fugitives, she instead exposes that Black racism and Black maintenance of the discourse of difference are what become the major stumbling blocks to fugitive success in Canada. Indeed, she goes further still, noting that aggressive deployment of a discourse of difference is the ideological component of an economic program that can extract profit only through the continued suppression and subjugation of the mass of fugitives. “The recently arrived fugitives, unacquainted with the true state of things, are completely convinced by the noisy philippic against all the ‘white folks,’ and all colored ones who think differently from them [the segregationists],” rages Shadd at the crass opportunism of those in the Bibb group whom she calls “demagogues” preventing “the spread of education and general intelligence” among the arriving fugitives in order to “maintain an ascendancy over the inferior minds around them” (33). Shadd explicitly criticizes Bibb’s utilization of an identity claim of “common origin and kindred sufferings” with the destitute fugitives to legitimate his representative status in the eyes of the dominant society. Further, as we shall see below, she details how such a claim is reified as the Bibbs’ economic self-interest then runs counter to the empowerment and social emergence of the fugitive community. Shadd’s critique of Bibb, based on economics, leaves the latter’s “common origin” claim in place but irretrievably subverts the further one of “kindred sufferings” and the representative status that flows out of such an assertion.

The dynamics at work in the split between Shadd and Bibb are similar to those fuelling the conflicts between the integrationist W.E.B. Du Bois and the segregationist Booker T. Washington. Further, it is this heritage—which Malcolm X (among others) identified as class conflict within the Black community and Cornel West now describes as fundamental to the contemporary crisis of Black leadership—that has hindered the socially transformative efforts of the African American protest movements of the 1960s. West, reviewing contemporary Black separatist leaders, echoes Shadd, explaining that such “representatives”

actually operate more in the tradition of Booker T. Washington, by confining themselves to the black turf, vowing to protect their leadership status over it, and serving as power brokers over it with powerful nonblack elites (usually white economic or political elites) to “enhance” this black turf. (60)

As Shadd demonstrates, Bibb and his group advocated segregation and mobilized the hegemonic ideology of difference as a means to secure individual political and economic power. In a letter written to American Missionary Association official George Whipple, Shadd illustrates just how profitable the deployment of a discourse of difference had become for Bibb. Responding to the “falsehoods” communicated against her by members of the Bibb group, Shadd, writing from the presumably vulnerable antebellum social location of an unmarried Black woman, directly challenges the man who was probably the most powerful Black figure in Canada at the time:

Within the present year, and during the time he has been asking for “donations” etc. to help him out of difficulty, he has built a house, bought a vessel, bought a house and lot, on which he lives, leased another, and Mrs. Bibb has purchased a farm, and there are other business operations I can mention…. This is the man who is “making sacrifices” for the fugitives. The man who travels West with toes and elbows out, to create sympathy … and who at home, wraps up in purple and fine linen by warm fires, and sends from his door naked fugitives, on the plea that “abolitionists have left it discretionary with him to give or not.” Fugitives have come to me to inquire what steps must be taken to recover money given by him, on the pretence that they would not know how to spend it. (qtd. in Bearden and Butler 119)

Shadd’s critical examination resonates with those launched in the twentieth century by oppositional intellectuals such as Malcolm X—who notes that “up to now, the strategy of America has always been to tuck all of our leaders up into her dress, and besiege them with money, with prestige, with praise, and make them jump, and tell them what to tell us”(117)—and, in a more international context, by Frantz Fanon, who analyses the betrayal of colonized underclasses by the newly emergent national bourgeoisie (150). Although the specifics of these conflicts differ according to a shifting historical context, their tenacious presence within minority and/or subordinate social groups attempting to emerge in societies shot through with systemic class and race domination marks a pattern that deserves continuous investigation. Winks himself admits that the “Shadd faction was quite correct in its assessment of the Home Society’s begging system” (207), yet remains unable or unwilling to extrapolate from this admission the crucial importance that this early conflict signifies. What Shadd clearly understood was that the Bibb “faction” was, in fact, an early manifestation of a developing and hungry class fraction within the fugitive community. This fraction was more than willing to exploit and, as Shadd points out, to extend that community’s oppressed position as a necessary condition for the expansion of its own particular economic interests.

It is not that Shadd is discriminating against the process of representation as such; indeed, she is herself an intellectual “representative” of the fugitive community. What Shadd identifies, and subjects to merciless critique, is the reification of that representative status where the collective welfare of the fugitive community is subjected to the self-serving economic interest of the class fraction represented by the Bibbs. “The days of brokering for the black turf—of posing as the Head Negro in Charge (H.N.I.C.)—are over,” states West, who goes on to explain the crucial need for liberatory movements for the type of multidirectional and reflexive form of critique employed consistently by Shadd: “to be a serious black leader is to be a race-transcending prophet who critiques the powers that be (including the black component of the Establishment) and who puts forward a vision of fundamental social change for all who suffer from socially induced misery” (70). The tenacious persistence of these contradictory directions throughout the long history of Black intellectual praxis and social struggle demonstrates just how far the Bibb/Shadd conflict, and the latter’s critical vision, range beyond the parameters of “petty spirit” and “foolish quarrels” of which Winks spoke.

In addition to the intellectual courage Shadd demonstrates by her pamphlet’s critique of the existing fugitive leadership, it also provides a keen political perspective that surfaces in her understanding of the issue of fugitive migration. Historian George M. Frederickson observes that, beginning in 1817 with the founding of the American Colonization Society, many of the White abolitionist and philanthropic organizations advocated “African colonization as the panacea that would not only solve the free-Negro crisis but also open the way to the gradual extinction of slavery” (5–6). As mentioned above, Africa, though supported as a destination for fugitives by such nineteenth-century luminaries as Horace Greely and Harriet Beecher Stowe, was utterly unacceptable to Shadd. Her deep understanding of the exploitative nature of chattel slavery found utterly repugnant the notion that Black people—from whose collective back was extracted the labour so vital to America’s economic accumulation—should return to Africa infinitely poorer than the day their ancestors were forced to leave its shores.

Cognitively mapping the global situation of her particular historical moment, Shadd rejects “the policy of the dominant party in the United States, [which] is to drive free colored people out of the country, and to send them to Africa, only” (Plea 37), and deduces that the best option for fugitives is to be in alliance with Britain. “So there seems to be no safe alternative left but to be satisfied with that government now existing that is most reliable and most powerful,” she concludes on the subject of fugitive migration, adding that “that government is Great Britain; her dependencies form a secure home for the American Slave, and the disgraced free man” (40). Shadd saw in Britain the only nation that could effectively check the expansion of a rapidly industrializing capitalist America poised on the brink of empire and dragging in its chain a racist ideological apparatus forged in the oppressions and exploitations of chattel slavery. In this situation, the best options for fugitive migration were Canada or the West Indies.

This choice has little or nothing to do with a latent Anglophilia or with attaining the “promised land” that is constructed in most slave narratives, where Canada is represented as the safe space of rest, free from the coerced labour of slavery and the severe restrictions and oppressions necessitated under systemic White supremacy. Contrary to this construction of Canada, so prevalent that even the penetrating visionary Du Bois accepts it uncritically, Shadd configures the nation north of the forty-ninth parallel as a secure and strategically positioned military base outside of the US from which fugitives can engage the struggle against slavery more effectively by “strengthen[ing] the British in [those] quarter[s], and thus keeping up ‘the balance of power’” (38).

Shadd viewed fugitive migration to these sites as an explicit challenge to an emerging American empire and therefore as efforts “to preserve those countries from the ravages of slavery, [which] should be the motive [for] their settlement by colored free men” (37). Of Jamaica, Shadd observed that “properly garrisoned by colored free men, [it] may, under Britain, promptly and effectually check foreign interference” (37). War—as her later comradeship with John Brown, the hefty amount of space she would devote to it in the pages of her newspaper, and her subsequent work as a recruiter for the Union army all attest—was not an unusual or infrequent subject of thought for Shadd. As her biographers point out, it is this consciousness of imminent conflict that forms the heart of Shadd’s vision of fugitive migration: “One begins to see, as perhaps Mary Shadd saw, strategic placements of armed black men, hovering south as well as north of the U.S. border, exerting a containing influence on American slavery or expansionism” (Bearden and Butler 59). Given that a Shadd editorial states unequivocally that “we wish there were 50,000 colored soldiers along the line, but on this side of it,” one only wonders why the biographers used the qualifier “perhaps” (Editorial). What is striking here, and what makes Shadd unique among most other writers (Black or White) of the period, is her insistence that the question of fugitive migration be oriented around the central criterion of the need to contain American slavery and expansionism. In fact, Shadd’s aggressive and politically engaged theory of migration demands the reworking of Du Bois’s earlier depiction of fugitive migration. Rejecting unconditionally the notion of migration as the passive acceptance of shelter under British protection, she instead envisions the fugitive community as potentially adding another claw to the lion’s paw.

We should note here just how much Shadd’s construction of fugitive cultural identity differs from that configured by Bibb. Most of Bibb’s relative wealth and power depended upon what Winks terms “begging schemes.” These schemes relied on the consistent representation of fugitives as destitute and passive victims incapable of self-reliance. At the very best, these communities worked slowly toward some vague notion of integration deferred into an unspecified future. This structural relation, then, delimits fugitive cultural identity and agency to the internal terrain of segregated and therefore marginalized Black communities. In this manner, all fugitive agency within Canadian society is contained within the intellectual figure of Bibb and the small faction he represented, who turned their intermediary position into a profit opportunity. In contrast, Shadd’s construction of cultural identity injects the fugitive community into history, that is, into the objective historical struggle expressed here by the call to oppose not only slavery but a burgeoning American global hegemony: “and let our emigrants so abolitionize and strengthen neighboring positions as to promote the prosperity and harmony of the whole” (Plea 42).

Bibb’s reified intellectual practice resembles that later employed by Black intellectuals such as Booker T. Washington and, in our own moment, by the type of Black leaders identified in West’s critique. In contrast, Shadd’s intellectual praxis, which insists on the full participation of the fugitive masses in both the society and the global struggle of their age, finds its resonance in twentieth-century Black oppositional intellectuals like Ella Mae Baker, who observes that “strong people don’t need strong leaders” (qtd. in Sharlett 2). Indeed, Shadd’s construction of a participatory cultural identity geared for political activism embodies the “task of the agent of social change,” described by Manning Marable as the effort to “make practical and yet visionary demands upon the oppressed classes, demands that will disrupt the established order with the broadest possible participation of the oppressed classes or social fractions” (71). In fact, Shadd’s unflinching insistence on fugitive participation illustrates the point made much later by Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward that “people cannot defy institutions to which they have no access, and to which they make no contribution” (29).

The implications for liberatory movements and the issue of containment are key here. Bibb’s exclusionary program assembles the masses of fugitives, along with their labour power, under his direct control. In this situation, he becomes their only link to mainstream Canadian society and his articulation their only voice within the institutions of that society. This creates what C.L.R. James calls “the scandalous but inevitable developments in such relations known all over the colored world” where “there is created a constantly growing vested interest in segregation itself” (207). However, Shadd’s project for fugitive integration, in its full expression, would necessitate a shrinking of the intellectual’s function as representative intermediary, since fugitives themselves are required, through integration, to speak in their own voices within the institutions of their newly adopted society. Shadd’s vision leads to the empowerment of a people, Bibb’s to the empowerment of himself.

In the final paragraph of A Plea for Emigration, Shadd reiterates her position on the question of fugitive emigration, arguing that it should be answered according to “whether or not an extensive emigration by the free colored people of the United States would affect the institution of slavery” (44). Again, demonstrating the rhetorical skill found throughout her writing, she responds:

I have here taken the affirmative of that question, because that view of the case seems to me most clear. The free colored people have steadily discountenanced any national scheme of emigration, in the hope that by remaining in the United States, a powerful miracle for the overthrow of slavery would be wrought. What are the facts. More territory has been given up to slavery, the Fugitive Law has passed, and a concert of measures, seriously affecting their personal liberty, has been entered into by several of the Free states; so subtle, unseen and effective have been their movements, that, were it not that we remember there is a Great Britain, we would be overwhelmed, powerless, from the force of such successive shocks; and the end may be yet, if we persist in remaining targets, while they are strengthening themselves in the Northwest, and in the Gulf. (44)

Thus, for Shadd, fugitive migration has little if nothing to do with “running away” from the material reality of chattel slavery, nor with passive acceptance of British protection. Rather, it concerns the desire to fully realize and effectively mobilize Black agency in the anti-slavery struggle.

Shadd’s call to extend the Black anti-slavery struggle beyond national boundaries is echoed a century later by Malcolm X, who criticized those who understood African American liberation in more limited terms. In particular, her recognition of the way that failure to internationalize the political consciousness generated in anti-slavery struggle demoralizes Black insurgency parallels Malcolm’s own criticism of Black leaders who constructed African-American liberatory struggle as solely a domestic affair:

Their thinking is usually domestic, confined to the boundaries of America, and they always look upon themselves as a minority. When they look upon themselves upon the American stage, the American stage is a white stage. So a black man standing on that stage in America automatically is in the minority. He is the underdog, and in his struggle he always uses an approach that is a begging, hat-in-hand, compromising approach. (52)

Shadd, whose newspaper, The Provincial Freeman, would carry the slogan “Self Reliance is the True Road to Independence,” aggressively excoriated all such begging and compromising approaches, arguing that fugitive migration to Canada is “more in the right spirit,” enabling “infinitely more of manliness … [than] a miserable scampering from state to state, in a vain endeavor to gather the crumbs of freedom that a pro-slavery bosom may sweep away at any moment” (Plea 44). In addition, her characteristic rhetorical movement—between the specificity of fugitive experience and the global relations evolving under the pressure of an advancing American imperialism—resonates with the same emphasis by post-war progressive theorists such as Raymond Williams, who insists that the local must be viewed through the general which marks its conditions of emergence in the first place. The cultural identity that Shadd attempts to construct for the fugitive is one that activates subjective agency by placing it firmly within a global context defined by crisis, conflict, and political struggle. This identity construction is consistent with that suggested by Williams, who sees generalization as the “necessary way of affirming … real social identities,” and who stressed that such “full, active social identities” are crucial to the promotion of collective, insurgent, political praxis (29).

A Plea for Emigration marks the beginning of Shadd’s cultural production in Canada. In the wake of its publication, the conflicts with the Bibb faction would intensify, and, considering the vision of fugitive identity she puts forward in this pamphlet, we gain a better understanding of just how dangerous an example of fugitive leadership she felt they provided: “I have seen the miserably clad fugitives fresh from a southern plantation sent away empty,” writes Shadd of Bibb’s power of dispensation, “when in the cellar under our feet were … clothes rotting”; and again “the position of the Bibbs is calculated to do a vast deal of good or evil which ever they will—but from their public position it is exercised for evil” (Shadd qtd. in Bearden and Butler 66, 67).

Her challenge to the micro-hegemony of Bibb in the context of the abolitionist organizational structure within which he wielded considerable power would prove exceedingly difficult. The passage above is from a letter she wrote to the American Missionary Association in order to expose the Bibbs’ appropriation of resources intended for the fugitives. Still, as Bearden and Butler point out, “we should remember … that here was a black woman speaking to a white man about the failures of other white men [along with Bibb, Shadd mentions local white abolitionists and missionaries ‘of good hearts, but sadly under their influence’], because we can be certain that those involved never forgot for a moment” (67). Marable’s observation regarding Black political formation sheds further light on the conflict between Shadd and Bibb and their different responses to the questions of fugitive migration and fugitive cultural identity:

Inherent in all social structure is the problem of bureaucracy, which for the oppressed is generally a petty-bourgeois elite that assumes certain functions of the movement as a whole. Radical Black intellectuals may in theory commit “class suicide,” but they are socialized within the cultural hegemony of capitalism, and therefore tend to replicate the [dominant] political procedures … within the process of their own social movement. In practice, this means a refusal to learn from the masses, and a tendency to “dictate” to them; a psychological tendency that assumes that poor people or workers require an “intermediary” who can best represent their grievances before the capitalists and political authorities. (70)

Here Marable helps to clarify how the reification by Black intellectuals of an intermediary position is, more or less, structurally imposed, and how the practice of class suicide, though always conditioned by context, represents a conscious and vigilant effort to resist such structural pressures. Understanding the structural force of this process, which has been and continues to be one of the most significant challenges to Black intellectuals, helps to avoid the too-easy and unproductive disparagement of Bibb’s form of intellectual practice, while simultaneously increasing our appreciation for the insurgent intellectual praxis of Shadd. The Bibbs contrived to discredit Shadd with the American Missionary Association, which revoked her teaching stipend, and, in control of an internationally distributed anti-slavery newspaper, their position, and the capacity to exploit that position, were secure. Nevertheless, the irrepressible intellectual energy and political activity of Mary Ann Shadd, fuelled by the needs of the increasingly besieged fugitive community, would continue in an astonishing variety of cultural forms, throughout the decade of the 1850s and beyond.

My focus on Shadd’s pamphlet A Plea for Emigration, on the conflicts between her and the group represented by the figure of Bibb, and on their different modes of intellectual praxis arises as part of the ongoing attempt to grapple with the difficult question of how to excavate such a figure in light of the contemporary context of Black Canadian cultural studies. The historical figure of Shadd is one available for appropriation into a number of contemporary theoretical categories: Black Canadian, African American, Women’s Studies, Postcolonial Migrancy, Diaspora, Black Atlantic, Black History, Canadian History, and so on. That Shadd can be recuperated under such a multivalent and heterogeneous array of theoretical approaches strongly attests to both the impressive range of her intellectual praxis and an increasing recognition of the historical importance of this remarkable woman. I am convinced that this current “popularity” is, in all its forms, a positive development.

Nevertheless, I suggest that, as the figure of Shadd rises from the pages of history and is transmuted into the status of academic commodity, the problem of keeping faith with her political engagement, collective commitment, and intellectual praxis is foregrounded. Marable observes that, even if when falling short of their ultimate goal of “restructuring the state apparatus and the basic power relations within a given society,” previous Black social movements such as that represented in the cultural work of Shadd “always contain the seeds of a future political revolution” (72). James adds that, in abolitionist intellectuals, we have before us a model that anticipates some of the most radical forms of twentieth-century intellectual praxis (91). To conclude this essay, it might be helpful to set the example offered by Shadd in relation to the model of intellectual praxis put forward by Antonio Gramsci in his Prison Notebooks.

In his model of radical intellectual praxis, Gramsci makes a crucial distinction between “traditional” and “organic” intellectuals. According to Gramsci, the former can be drawn from any class, including the most subjected ones, but function to secure the ideological hegemony of the ruling class. Within the context of this discussion, we might view Bibb, the former slave become “respectable” bourgeois articulating the hegemonic ideology of racial difference, as a particular version of the traditional intellectual. In opposition to this model of intellectual work (which we might think of as typified in our own context by the university-bound minority intellectual trapped in the straitjacket of identity politics), Gramsci poses that of the organic intellectual. He argues that any subordinated group developing toward emergence into the social terrain must be able to produce its own organic intellectuals who, despite their class origin, maintain an organic connection and commitment to the emancipatory struggles of subordinate classes. Of these organic intellectuals, Gramsci writes:

The mode of being of the new intellectual can no longer consist in eloquence, which is an exterior and momentary mover of feelings and passions, but in active participation in practical life, as constructor, organiser, “permanent persuader” and not just a simple orator. (10)

Gramsci here describes a model of intellectual praxis that fits well with the life and work of Shadd, who, through the practice of class suicide, forsakes her initial location in the Black proto-bourgeoisie of her day and puts her intellectual production to work in the service of the most oppressed sector of her society. As Abu-Jamal implies, Gramsci articulates, and the tradition of Black struggle makes clear, the direction identified in the example of Bibb finds its end in containment, while the type of intellectual praxis stemming from the class suicide committed by Shadd tends always toward the further development of the liberatory potential contained within subjected classes.

Winks describes Shadd as “vigorous, honest, and outspoken, but with little gift for eloquence” (395). Gramsci’s model for intellectual praxis helps to understand such ineloquence in a much more positive light, as the only useful response of the oppressed and their intellectuals to an intolerable social situation. It is only in the final sentence of Notes that Shadd gives us an example of her own version of eloquence: “A little folding of the hands,” writes Shadd, combining poetry and politics to form a searing image in the mind of her reader, “and there will be no retreat from the clutches of the slave power” (44).

The passive folded hands mark a sharp contrast to the predatorial “clutches” of the American slaveocracy, and powerfully remind the prospective fugitive that migration to Canada has little to do with escape from struggle and everything to do with gaining a more solid foothold from which to overthrow slavery. Shadd would go on from the publication of this pamphlet to teach, organize, lecture, and produce her own anti-slavery newspaper, The Provincial Freeman, in which her internal critiques of the begging system, fugitive leaders such as Bibb, and African colonizationist schemes would be matched by an external one that took up the battle against increasingly racist assaults launched at the fugitives in the cultural apparatuses of the Canadian mainstream. Her time in Canada would end only with the formal onset of the war against slavery, which she had already been fighting so long, and her appointment as a recruiter for the Union army. It is quite possible that Black Canadian history has produced no more shining example of insurgent intellectual praxis than that of Mary Ann Shadd. Yet, it seems to me, this example is severely tarnished if we fail to link it, and the lessons it provides, to our own moment of danger and the forms of intellectual praxis that Black and minority Canadian intellectuals construct in response to this ongoing crisis.

Note
I would like to acknowledge the financial assistance of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). Also, I would like to thank David Chariandy and Jennifer Harris, the former for his careful editorial assistance with this essay and both for their patience and encouragement, and Dr. Pamela McCallum for a research assistantship without which this paper would not have been completed. Finally, I was informed of Dr. Christian’s passing during the completion of this essay and think it fitting to honour her memory by linking it with that of Mary Ann Shadd.

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