Nneka D. Dennie, "Mary Ann Shadd Cary: Essential Writings of a Nineteenth Century Black Radical Feminist" (Oxford UP, 2023)
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Welcome to the New Books Network. In 1849, the subject of today's book had not yet become one of the first Black woman newspaper editors in North America.

She was decades away from being admitted to Howard University's law school and becoming the first Black woman to so enroll in the United States. She had not yet begun to lobby for women's right to vote. And she had not yet emigrated to Canada, where she would rise to prominence as a formidable abolitionist and immigrationist.

Though many years would pass before she made a name for herself as a gifted writer, editor, lecturer, educator, lawyer, and suffragist, in 1849, Mary Ann Shad Carey was already certain of one thing. We should do more and talk less.

We are here today with Dr. Nneka D. Denny, editor of Mary Ann Shad Carey, Essential Writings of a 19th Century Black Radical Feminist, published by Oxford University Press. Dr. Denny is an assistant professor of history, core faculty in the Africana Studies Program, and affiliate faculty in the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at Washington and Lee University.

Dr. Denny, welcome to the New Books Network. Thank you so much for having me. Dr. Denny, what brought you to Marianne Shad Carey, who is maybe not the first person people think about when we talk about abolitionists or even Black abolitionists or even women abolitionists? What brought you to her?

Yeah, it's a little bit of a roundabout story with how I came to her. I first encountered Shad Carey when I was in grad school and I was preparing for comps, that process where we're reading a lot of books and then we're preparing to go answer more questions about these books and papers and so on and so forth. And in the course of doing so, I was focusing broadly on 19th and 20th century Black women's history. And when it was

Time for me to look at the 19th century books in particular. I kept seeing her name in passing, but didn't see very much that was specifically about her. There were a few articles here and there. There was Jane Rhodes's biography of Shad Carey, but she was a recurring name as I was preparing for my comps. Later on, when the time came for me to work on my dissertation, I decided to focus on six women and she was one of them.

My dissertation was broadly looking at the politics of respectability and Black women's radicalism, particularly the interaction between these two things during the early, mid, and late 19th century. So I looked at Shad Carey alongside Mariah Stewart, Sojourner Truth, Frances Harper, Anna Julia Cooper, and Ida B. Wells.

As most academics might know, typically once you're finished with your dissertation, you're supposed to publish that as a book. You're not supposed to do your little side quests until after the academic powers that be have given you tenure and that allows you to go do your side quests and go rogue as you please. I decided to go rogue a little bit sooner than intended, however, because this was actually not supposed to be my first book.

My second book accidentally became my first book, in part because of the 200-year anniversary of Shad Carey's birth.

I was fortunate enough to still be in touch with my undergraduate advisor, Neil Roberts, who connected me with Melvin Rogers, who was editing the series that this book is a part of, Oxford New Histories of Africana Philosophy. And as I was chatting with Melvin, he explained what the series was doing. He mentioned that they have primary source readers that they are including in the series. And he asked if I had any ideas. I said, well,

I would kind of like to do this book about Shad Carey, but I'm not planning to get there just yet. And Melvin is the person who mentioned, actually, the anniversary is coming up. So perhaps that's a good time to do it.

So that's kind of how the idea for prioritizing the book sooner rather than later came into being and how I first encountered Shad Carey. Okay. It's so interesting that you say her name kept coming up in other places because, in fact, for me, when I saw your book, I saw it online is the first place I saw it. And when I saw your book, I thought,

You know, the blurb looked interesting, but I thought, oh, you know, why do I know that name? Again, other than simply being an abolitionist, why I know that name, why do I know that name? And I went back digging through my own bookshelf to figure out, like, where had I come up with that name? And it was it was interesting.

In reading, I had done a bunch of reading about John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry. And yes, Osborne Anderson, who was the only surviving Black raider, went to Canada, hooked up with Marianne Shad Carey, and she published his account, his firsthand account of John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry. So I thought, oh, this is where it is. This is how I know this woman's name. But like you said, I had never...

Other than that, I didn't know anything about her. Yeah, and her name comes up in connection with a lot of people, which was one of the fun parts of working on the book, too, because she had relationships with people like Frederick Douglass, with people like Martin Delaney, figures who we all know very well, right? And it was surprising to me, and I was...

not expecting that no one else had put together a primary source reader of Shad Carey's work already, simply because her name comes up so often, but oftentimes in the background or in passing as someone who was well-connected with Black abolitionist networks, was heavily involved with Black print culture, whose family was heavily involved in the Black freedom struggle during the 19th century. Yeah.

You write in the introduction that her legacy is continually overshadowed by that of other African-American thinkers during the mid to late 19th century, such as Martin Delaney and Francis Harper. Why do you think that is?

First and foremost, um, I would suggest that it is because of her, uh, controversial stature, right? Um, Shad Carey was, I would say, a firecracker. Um, she didn't always play nice with other people. Um,

I'm not that we expect Black activists and publishers to play nice with everybody all the time. There are many who famously did not. But I would say that that is one significant part of it. Shad Carey entered the Black political scene in Canada when she was relatively young. She was in her low to mid-20s at this time. And the Black leadership...

leaders had already been established, right? These major organizations, um, the, like the refugee home society, um, run by Henry Bibb and his wife, Mary Bibb, um, these sort of institutions were already in place. Um, so Shad Carey enters this scene, uh, and doesn't really, some might say pay her dues, uh,

in the ways that she might have been expected to at the time. She would engage in a prolonged conflict with Bibb and some of his allies over the funding and the kinds of support that they were offering to refugees. And she was very critical of other Black leaders, right? So I think that this kind of controversy is something that would be

emblematic in some ways of her willingness to speak out throughout her lifetime. Even well into the 80s, at one point in time, there is a newspaper article that is published in the Washington Bee that talks about Chad Carey's removal from her position at a school that she was working at at that point in time. And it describes her as someone who was once prominent, but

but is now more or less a cranky old lady. That's kind of how it describes her, right? So I think that that is one part of it, her fiery nature. I think another important reason why Shad Carey has not been recognized to the same extent as some of her more popular contemporaries has to do with the kind of great man narrative of history that we often see, right? Which does typically privilege men,

This is not to say that the long and short of it is misogyny or sexism, right? We do have really thorough histories of other 19th century Black women. But I do think that the privileging

of Black men when we're talking about Black radicalism, particularly during the 19th century, is part of the reason why. But then we've got women like Frances Harper, for instance, right? Why is she not on the same stature as Frances Harper? I would suggest that some of this is probably due to what Ashley Farmer terms the disorderly distributed archive, which is referring to the ways that Black women's writing, particularly Black radical women's writing, is not

collected all in one place, right? These records are sometimes everywhere in between different cracked nooks and crannies. And that can make it hard to have a cohesive view of who someone is, right? There's no single archive of Shad Carey's work in the same way that we might see for some other figures. And just in terms of geography, her materials are located all across North America, right?

So some materials, for instance, are at the Amistad Research Center in New Orleans. Some of her materials are at the Moreland Spingarn Research Center in Washington, D.C. Some of them are at the Archives of Ontario. And Shad Carey also published in a variety of different newspapers, not only her newspaper, The Provincial Freeman, but in other newspapers around the country. So it's not...

cohesive in the ways that we might expect for some other figures, which means that there has to be a bit more poking around in order to compile her materials and in order to present her in a way that seems coherent. Before you started working on this book, did you know that her archive was in all of these places? Or was that part of what, did you discover it along the way?

That was definitely something that I realized along the way. And I need to just really give another shout out to Ashley Farmer's concept because it made everything click for me as I was working on this book.

largely started this as a pandemic project. And at this point in time, we're talking April of 2020. We can't really go anywhere. But luckily for me, many of the newspapers that Shad Carey often publish in

were available online. They were digitized in accessible archives. The Provincial Freeman, for instance, and other newspapers that she published in, like the New National Era, that was one of Frederick Douglass's newspapers. There was a lot of digital material through these newspapers that made it easy to get the project started. And once I got a little bit deeper into it and had to expand where I was looking, that's really when I realized that her materials are everywhere. Mm-hmm.

Okay. Well, so let's get into some of the substance of those materials. One of the things your book seeks to do, as you write in the introduction, is to foreground how 19th century Black women, who are frequently characterized as doers rather than thinkers, laid the foundation for Africana philosophy. Talk more about that.

Yeah, absolutely. By that, I mean that we have a lot of histories of 19th century Black women that rightfully focus on their everyday lives and labors, right? That rightfully focus on Black women's organizing. But the emphasis on action sometimes causes us to neglect that

the emphasis on rationality, the intellectual processes that inform said action, right? These are two things that go hand in hand in terms of theory and praxis. And I'm really glad that over the past probably...

10 to 15 years, we've seen more and more work about 19th century Black women's intellectual history in particular, with several different readers that have been published as edited collections where you've got book chapters that are focusing on various Black women intellectuals. So I'm glad to see that this is something that has been gaining steam. But I would say in the grand scheme of things, this is a relatively recent shift.

in the historiography of 19th century Black women. And so it is 100% worthwhile to focus on Black women activists, to focus on everyday Black women. I don't mean to suggest that there was something wrong with focusing on Black women as doers,

But we should also focus on what they're thinking and saying. Black women have ideas. And what I was really concerned with was the ways that we have different lenses that filter how we interpret Black women, some of which prompt us to dismiss their ideas when Black women have a point. And as I write in the book,

As I say to my students all the time, Black women have been saying the same thing for hundreds of years. So part of what I really wanted to do was edit a book that would encourage people to listen to Black women, not just look at what we're doing, but listen to what we're saying as well.

So at the top, you talked some about various women that you were studying and continue to study. And you suggest that what unites various forms of Black radicalism is a Black radical ethic of care. Talk about that Black radical ethic of care. Absolutely. So when I use this term, a Black radical ethic of care, what I'm

What I'm really focusing on is three different things that I see as the height of Black radicalism. If we have to distill it into a few things, what is Black radicalism, right? And I would suggest that Black radicalism takes a lot of different forms, right? I prefer to think of Black radicalisms in the plural as

not just one singular form of Black radicalism. And so as I was working through this concept, I was really thinking about how we can account for the differences that we might see between 19th and 20th century Black radicalism.

the differences that we might see between Black men's and Black women's Black radicalism, for instance, and the shifts that we see over time and across time and space with what Black radicalism means at a particular point in time and in a particular setting or in response to a particular set of questions. That being said, the three things that I saw as unique

uniting various forms of Black radicalism, was thinking about the multilayered forms of oppression that target Black communities, critiquing the micro and macro level manifestations of anti-Blackness and white supremacy, and articulating or acting on a desire to realize change on behalf of Black communities. So these are some features that let us see how people are focused really narrowly or really broadly

on questions of Black radicalism. They help us see the overlapping questions and the kinds of overlapping identities that Black people hold while still responding to the realities of anti-Blackness.

And most importantly, I think that this offering of a Black radical ethic of care helps us to be inclusive of the different kinds of Black radicalism that exist, right? Whether we're talking about communism and Marxism as forms of Black radicalism, whether we're talking about Black feminism as forms of radicalism,

as a form of Black radicalism. And regardless of what time period we're talking about, too. Part of the reason why I arrived at this concept also has to do with some of the temporal emphases that we see when we're thinking about Black radicalism. If you say those words in that order to somebody, they're most likely going to think about the 20th century.

Right. They're not necessarily going to go to 19th century abolitionists. They might be thinking about the Black Panthers, for instance. But people in the 19th century were also Black radicals. When you say those words, they might think of particular concepts, too, like talking about capitalism, for instance, like talking about armed resistance. And even though Black thinkers during the 19th century might not have used those exact terms,

These are nevertheless questions that they were still thinking about. Slavery is fundamentally a labor question in relation to racism, right? Black people during the 19th century were also thinking about how to defend themselves, how to protect themselves, even though they might not have used the exact kinds of language we see emerging in the 20th century

to talk about on self-defense, to talk about Black resistance. So with this concept of a Black radical ethic of care, I see it as a bridge between different kinds of Black radicalism in the sense that it can help us see the overlaps without universalizing or homogenizing different kinds of Black radicalism.

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And how much of the answer might be all of it, but this this idea of a black radical ethic of care went into your organization of the book, right? Because the book is not chronological beginning to end. You know, it's thematic.

Right. This was something that I thought about in terms of what would be most legible to readers. As I was putting the book together and as I was thinking about how to organize it, I sat down and I wrote a list of the different themes that I see emerging in Shad Carey's work at different points in time. So,

Some of them I would ultimately lump under the umbrella of racial uplift in terms of how Shad Carey writes about the relationships between education and integration and self-reliance, right? Some of these things I put under the umbrella of racial uplift. Another important theme that we see emerging is how Shad Carey talks about women and gender and the theme that she is most often associated with, emigration.

So these three broad categories, racial uplift, which have a lot of subcategories, to be honest, women's rights, immigration, seem to be the major preoccupations in her work over the course of her lifetime. Something that I was also really attentive to as I was editing the book was how

how we might be able to understand Shad Carey when we shift focus away from this relatively limited period of 1853 to 1857. Shad Carey launched the Provincial Freeman in 1853, which made her the first Black woman newspaper editor in North America. The year prior, she published her landmark pamphlet, A Plea for Emigration.

And so really, there's a lot of work that focuses on Shad Carey in relation to a plea for emigration and the provincial freemen. So looking at this time period from 1852 to 1857, leaves us to think that the main issue and perhaps the only issue Shad Carey focused on was emigration. The problem, however, is that Shad Carey was alive until 1893. Right.

So what happens over the course of these other 40 years? So I wanted to widen the scope of how we're looking at Shad Carey. And expanding that time period means that we're expanding the themes that we're seeing emerge in her work. So I was really trying to make sure that different decades were represented throughout the text.

There are not quite as many texts from the 1860s because of the Civil War, but I did include some that continue to talk, that really talk about emigration and that talk about labor in relation to the 1860s. And so this also helps us see some of the shifts that emerge throughout Chad Carey's intellectual work. Even though she is very adamant that emigration is dangerous

the solution to racism in the United States, even though she goes to Canada herself in 1851, she ultimately returns. She comes back to the United States in 1863 at the height of the Civil War. And so even though she writes in one of my favorite pieces called Meetings at Philadelphia that people should, quote, leave that slavery-cursed republic, she

she ultimately returns to that slavery-cursed republic, which to me suggests a certain kind of optimism about the possibility of progress with the coming of the Civil War. And during the Civil War, Shad Carey also recruited Black soldiers to the Union Army upon the invitation of Martin Delaney,

And we see that Shad Carey, who held steadfastly to the idea of immigration for over a decade, who became a naturalized citizen in Canada, comes back to the United States. Right. So we see shifts in Shad Carey's ideas when we look at a broader time period of her work.

We also see during Reconstruction that she develops a kind of disillusionment with the possibility of progress. She's critical of both Democrats and Republicans. She refers to the 14th and 15th Amendments, for instance, as being otherwise grand in conception, except for the fact that they did not explicitly include Black women, right? And so even though Shad Carey

was always insistent on Black women's right to be activists, on Black women's right to be publishers, we see her taking up more explicitly these questions around women's rights and women's suffrage once we move towards the 1870s. We also see her talking about labor, not only for African-Americans in general, but for Black women in particular too. And her focus on economic self-determination

is something that I see as a bit of an understudied aspect of her advocacy for immigration, right? She wasn't saying, let's emigrate just so that we can avoid racist people in the United States.

She was also saying, we'll have more and different kinds of labor opportunities if we go to Canada. We'll be able to control our labor more if we go to Canada. These are questions that emerged during the 1850s that she continues to take up during the 1870s, for instance, when she writes two letters to the people saying,

in Frederick Douglass's newspaper, The New National Era. And she writes specifically in one of those, the women must speak out, the boys must have trades. Wines that I think are really significant and really emblematic of the centrality of labor and economic self-determination to Shad Carey's intellectual thought. Mm-hmm.

There's about 12 questions, follow-up questions I want to ask you, but I want to ask them all simultaneously. And so trying to figure out, okay, where do we want to go next? Maybe let's go back to, you mentioned a quote from a meeting in Philadelphia that occurred. I want to go back to that because...

That was, I mean, there was a lot of favorite writings for me in this, but that was one of them. So in March 1857, the Dred Scott cases decided. And Shad Carey pens an anonymous letter in the Provincial Freedmen chiding abolitionists in Philadelphia.

And she writes that their resolutions amount to nothing if they aren't willing to leave the U.S. And this is a quote, I think, in adjacent to the one that you read. She wrote, your national ship is rotten, sinking. Why not leave it? And why not say so boldly, manfully? Yes. Like, I have a couple of questions about this. Who specifically is she talking to when she's saying you should leave?

Yeah, absolutely. I interpret her as speaking to interracial groups of activists. She's talking to Black people, but she's also talking to white abolitionists. So part of what she does in this piece is name drop some of the attendees at this interracial meeting that was held in Philadelphia. And so she's referring specifically to Lucretia Mott, William Still, Charles Lennox Reman, Robert Purvis,

and James Miller McKim. But I think that she's not just speaking to them alone. She also name drops some of these major abolitionist families, the Purvis's, the Remans. And I see this as her saying, not just you guys, but everyone who is critical

Everyone who is critical of the Dred Scott decision, you need to you need to leave the United States and not lend credence to not lend credence to the denial of rights to African-Americans.

She also has another line in there that I really enjoy where she says,

as they claim to believe in the United States Constitution. We shall wait with patience to see what it will do for them. We hope, however, that they too will look at facts instead of everlastingly theorizing. I just really, really love this piece because the kinds of disillusionment that she's talking about here are really emblematic of what I think a lot of African-Americans, a lot of other marginalized populations in the United States have experienced for the past decades.

perhaps 10 years or so, right? She, this line that they claim to believe in the United States Constitution is one that I find really amusing in light of, well, in a kind of dark way, right? Really amusing because we see the Constitution failing us every single day, every single day. And so as Shag Carey is writing this piece, I see her as speaking to anyone

not just the free and independent colored citizens, as she writes. But I see her as speaking to anyone who claims to believe in the United States Constitution. That she's saying, here is a blatant wrongdoing. If you think that this is wrong, and if you think the Constitution is right, clearly something is disconnected here. Mm-hmm.

One of the things I thought was really interesting about this particular argument is, I mean, you talked about, you sort of brought it forward to contemporary times, current times, right? And I think about how many people I have heard say, since 2016, continuing to currently, we should just leave. We should just leave. Just go away.

And I'm not making a value judgment on a decision to leave versus a decision to stay. But this idea of, oh, just leave. What struck me about with Shad Carey is I cannot imagine that in 1857, it was easy for anyone to leave, even to Canada. And we know a lot of people went to the UK as well. So, you know, I can't imagine it was easy.

easy for anyone to exit the United States in 1857, any easier than it is for anyone to exit the United States in 2025 or 2016. And so a little piece of me wondered about the privilege and the argument of you should all just leave.

Yeah, and that's valid, right? Because people, let's say they're coming from, I don't know, let's go with Maryland. I'm from Maryland, let's go with Maryland. I know that to get to Canada West, present day Ontario, from Maryland, that's at least a 13-hour drive at minimum, right? I can't imagine how long that...

how long that journey would take on horseback, for instance. I can't imagine how long that journey would take on foot. So there is this really tangible question of how do people get here, right? In terms of transportation, in terms of the lodging that they might need along the way, whether those are fugitives from slavery who are using the Underground Railroad to make it to freedom,

Um, whether that is free people who are trying to find boarding houses, if they could afford boarding houses. Um, so that's definitely a valid point that it's, it's not quite so easy to just leave. Um, at the same time though, Chad Carey did attempt to make the case for why Canada would be an excellent place to be, um, by writing a plea for emigration and talking about things like the soil quality, the crops, the temperatures. Um,

Things that, as contemporary readers, we might find to be a bit of a drag to get through if we're reading a plea for immigration and are not concerned in the various environmental characteristics. But this highlights for us how she wanted to help people see that it is feasible in spite of the difficulties that might emerge in getting from point A to point B. Yeah, I found that very interesting as well in reading. I had never read...

read A Plea for Emigration before. It was my first time reading it. And you're right. My takeaway in reading that is really what she was trying to do is demystify this Canada place, familiarize this Canada place to at least make it a plausible option for people. Mm-hmm.

Right, absolutely. And in doing so, this text exists within a broader genre of settler guides that other writers would have published to say like, hey, here's what it's like over here.

when they were relocating in some way, shape or form. And so I find it really interesting how she combines some of the tangible aspects of what does it mean in a practical sense to live in this new place. But she also makes a lot of different ideological arguments for emigration and why people should emigrate to Canada in particular. So I want to talk about another one of her speeches that you have in the book, which

She delivered a speech to the Judicial Committee regarding the rights of women to vote, and it is believed to have been delivered in 1874. And in a footnote, you write this erasure. So it's not in the record. As I understood it, it's actually not in the record. Yes.

That is correct. It is actually not in the record. So once we put together some other puzzle pieces, and as Jane Rhodes establishes, it appears that she delivered this speech alongside a group of white suffragists. And we've got the handwritten text of this speech available in the archives at Howard University, the Moreland-Spingarn Research Center. I

I have searched high and low to find the documentation in the National Archives. Other researchers have tried to look high and low as well. But she does not appear in this archive, right? And so this raises a couple questions.

Did she deliver the speech and people simply deemed it unimportant to record? Did she write the speech? Was she supposed to give a speech? And then it got pulled at the last minute. It appears that she delivered this speech. That's my understanding. But the absence from congressional records, I think, highlights how archives are not infallible. Right.

We know that there are different silences in the archives that can emerge from what people deem important to preserve or unimportant to preserve. And so this seems like one of those things. Yeah, it was not surprise, of course, not surprising, but also wild. Yes, completely. To think about. And I think for me, why I found it so wild is.

Unlike, say, a letter, right? Because we have a lot in the archives. You'll have someone that will say, like, I'm responding to your letter of X and you don't have the letter of X. Like, you can't find it. So you just sort of know there was a letter. But this was, as so far as we think and understand, humans present in front of other humans of which somebody is making record saying something and saying,

Yeah. And it's unconfirmed or at least unconfirmed in the, you know, air quotes, official. Right. Uh-huh. Absolutely. And so that I think is something that continues to surprise me. Right. We we know that Shad Carey.

did certain things, that she wrote certain things, but those records don't always corroborate one another, even though we can tell there's something there. So, for instance, I have not been able to find any records beyond Shad Carey's own notes about the Colored Women's Progressive Franchise Association. This was a short-lived organization that we know exists because there was a statement of purpose and purpose

There were minutes from their first meeting. But we're not seeing documentation of this anywhere else. That lack of documentation doesn't mean that the association did not exist, just that that information isn't preserved elsewhere beyond Shad Carey's own records of it. And so this, I think, is something that is likely at play as well regarding her speech to the Judiciary Committee.

One of the things you point out, which I, again, I thought was really interesting to think about is, and this goes back a little bit to this Black radical ethic of care, is you write that, you quote KT Ewing and the term the two-faced archive. And you talk a little bit about Shad Carey's archive as being a bit of a two-faced archive. Can you talk about what that is?

Yeah, absolutely. So this concept that KT Ewing introduces for us refers to the ways that there's a sort of separation between the public and the private archive, right? As well as the ways that Black women have archived themselves. Shag Carey, I think, was quite cognizant of her public presentation, right?

And I think that she took deliberate measures. I don't think, I know that she took deliberate measures to shield her private life from entering the public record alongside some of her ideas and writings and editorship of the provincial freemen. There are a few ways that we see this. One is that as Jim Casey has noted,

Shad Carey often signed editorials with an asterisk rather than her name. She took some measures to conceal her identity as editor of the Provincial Freeman. In that same vein, her name does not appear on the masthead of the newspaper as one of the editors.

It was a kind of open secret that she was the person behind the provincial freemen. But nevertheless, she attempted to establish some measure of anonymity in the work that she was doing. She would also later or occasionally sign her pieces with her initials, M.A.S.,

rather than her full name. At times, she would publish under Mary A. Shad. At times, she would publish under M. A. S. C. after she was married. But notably, when she was married, she did not begin to publish under her married name, Shad Carey, rather than simply Shad, for another six months, right? So there are some steps that we see very clearly in relation to the provincial freemen and in relation to her public work. But

where she attempted to curate an archive of herself that didn't lend too much insight into her private life. We also see, however, a kind of vulnerability in Shad Carey's correspondence that is largely absent from her publications. So by this, for instance, I...

I'm referring to some letters that she exchanged with the American Missionary Association where we see some cracks emerging as she talks about the difficulties that she personally is experiencing. I reference in the conclusion of the book, for instance, a letter where she essentially says, look, I...

I've been going through a lot of issues and perhaps someone with a stronger constitution than I could handle this, but I can't do it. Right. She also writes about her financial difficulties in some of these letters. Shad Carey, among the many hats that she wore was a teacher. And in Canada, she,

She established a school that was not paying her enough. And she said that she closed the school because she could not continue to, she could not continue to teach these students knowing that the tuition they were paying wouldn't even cover half of her expenses for a month. Right. And so what we're seeing with Shad Carey is that there are these moments where she's talking about her challenges. She's talking about her difficulties in a really personal sense. Yeah.

But these are taking place publicly or these are taking place privately rather than publicly. So this book is a reader. It's not it's not a biography. It's a reader. And, you know, when you read biography, the author is clearly present in the text because it's written in third person. And, you know, even though you're talking about another person and it strikes me that you as the editor have.

an incredibly strong hand in this book in terms of how you're going to organize the material. I want to talk about the footnotes in a minute as well that are there. But aside from the footnotes, maybe, you know, your hand perhaps could be an invisible hand. Right.

in the organization of the materials. And so I'm curious about how you thought about your role as the invisible hand of the editor in putting together this material. Right. So I saw my role with this text

to be, I would say, perhaps twofold. To give people the information that they need in order to understand what was being discussed in some of these primary sources. So, for instance, when we see initials appearing

We might know that W.S. means William Still if we're familiar with 19th century African-American history. But if that's not in your wheelhouse, you're probably wondering who is W.S., right? When we're seeing initials or names, things like that.

when she's making reference or other documents are making reference to some contemporary issues that would have been occurring. I try to offer appropriate amounts of context so that people know what's going on, right? Just in terms of factual information. But what I also wanted to do was to make sure that the text, to the extent that it's possible,

encourages other people to do more research into Shad Carey. And so that's necessarily something that requires a bit of analysis to tease out some of the finer points of what she's saying, what she's doing, and how we're seeing certain concepts at work with Shad Carey. I don't...

I didn't want to be overly analytical. I tried to save that for the introduction and for the conclusion. But there are some footnotes where I go into a bit more detail about what Shad Carey is saying. Occasionally where there might be some oversights in what she's saying. And also really significantly...

to cite other scholars who have produced work that is relevant to understanding Shad Carey. Some of the analysis that I do is,

tries to use this citational practice to credit other people for their work. None of us are doing this work in a vacuum, right? And to make sure that people who are interested in doing more research on Shad Carey know where they can look in order to do so. Whether that's checking out someone who's referenced in the footnotes, whether that's me mentioning an idea that I've thought about but can't go into too deeply for the purposes of this project, right?

Those are some of what I wanted to do with the footnotes. It makes a lot of sense as you walk through there now, because I'm remembering some of the footnotes. And again, the explanatory ones sort of feel a little bit, you know, kind of easy, that kind of thing. But, you know, in places where you talked about earlier, you know, larger project involving respectability politics, you know, there are footnotes that talk quite a bit about respectability politics.

politics. And again, footnotes that sort of pull us or connect us to the contemporary era. Talking about Black Lives Matter, talking about Ice-T. That's my favorite footnote. Does Ice-T know that he's in a footnote in an academic text?

I did tag him on Twitter with that footnote. I don't know whether he saw that footnote, but I did tag him. And for the listeners who might not have read the book and who might have read the book and don't see this exact footnote, Ice-T tweeted a couple years ago something to the effect of...

right wing and left wing, I don't care. They're both on the same bird. Something like that was the extent of his, was the extent of his tweet. And so I referenced that in relation to a letter that Shad Carey, a letter to the editor that Shad Carey published during Reconstruction, where she was critical of both Democrats and Republicans. If memory serves me right, I believe she referred to rabid Democrats and lukewarm Democrats

very lukewarm Republicans, right? So she's acknowledging that in some ways the Democrats were simply the lesser of two evils as both political parties were complicit in white supremacy to different extents. Mm-hmm.

So we had talked already about the organization of material and how you were thinking about organizing the material. And you talked some about the chapters. You have a chapter, though, entitled Contextualizing Shad Carey. And that chapter is not her writing. It's other people writing about her. And it's...

It seems to me, given what we've said already about her, the circles in which she traveled in and her many very strong opinions about a lot of things, that the sky was sort of the limit in terms of, like, am I right in guessing there was a lot of things you could have put in this chapter? Yes, quite a bit of things I could have put in. So the main...

kinds of documents I tried to include in contextualizing Shad Carey were the documents that speak directly to some of the multi-layered conversations that she was having with other intellectuals, with other writers at this point in time.

I also wanted to include pieces that highlight her relationships with other figures like Delaney, like Douglas. And then some of the later pieces from the 1880s focus more so on how she was remembered at that point in time. So I referenced earlier, for instance, Delaney.

one of these articles from Washington, D.C. that portrays her kind of as a cantankerous old woman who was helpful once upon a time, but now is a bit of a rabble rouser, right? So I wanted to highlight people's various perspectives towards Shad Carey across her lifetime. One of my favorite pieces of that regard is a letter from Fred

Frederick Douglass, where he's writing directly to Shad Carey. And just to share a couple lines from this letter, he says, basically, he says, yes, I'm going to publish a piece of yours in next week's newspaper. I can introduce you to the readers. And he writes, I think, a really beautiful note where he says,

I will, however, in next week's paper, give you a suitable introduction to my Southern readers and bespeak for you the cordial and respectful welcome which you so well deserve, not only because of your talents, but because of your many and efficient labors for the freedom, education, and elevation of our still oppressed people. Go to the South, my friend.

go with words of chair, go with words of wisdom to our newly emancipated people and help them in their travels through the wilderness. And to all who know me or know of me, I commend you in all earnestness and truth. And I just think that that's a really beautiful sendoff, right? Um, and she's getting co-signed by Frederick Douglass. She's getting co-signed by Martin Delaney. So that signals for folks who might not be as familiar with Shad Carey, um,

how central she was to some of these networks at the time, how heavily, how deeply entrenched she was in these spaces, even though we might not always see her at the forefront. When I read that chapter and even where there's writing that is critical of her, I got this sense that

were she reading your reader and reading, you know, what you've collected that she would be like, damn right. Oh, I hope so. I like, I got, yeah, I got that sense that she was one of those people that if someone was going to say something negative about her, that was true. She was going to be like, yup. I said it. Yeah. I said it. And I'll do it again. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah.

So we talked about that, you know, this was not necessarily supposed to be your first book, but it is your first book. And so talk to me about what you learned as a historian and an author in the process of putting this book together. Yeah. In a really practical sense, I learned how much work goes into putting together a book. Yeah.

I know Mary Ann Shag Carey back to front at this point. Granted, there's always more to learn. She has so much writing. But I feel like I know her back to front at this point.

And I think that that feeling should accompany any kind of research project, right? That you know it very thoroughly. You've got this deep catalog of materials. So I learned how much research goes into a book. I also learned how much paperwork goes

goes into publishing a book in terms of getting... In terms of just in a practical sense, getting permissions to reproduce materials and so on and so forth. I would say in terms of what I learned...

content-wise, not just research-wise, that this book was really helpful for refining how I'm looking at Black radicalism and for how I'm thinking about what Black radicalism meant for Black women during the 19th century. I think that what emerges really clearly from Shad Carey's work is that a lot of the strategies that we would later associate with Black radicalism during the 20th century, a lot of the viewpoints had

had their early roots in the 19th century in ways where we can connect the dots in terms of strategies like publishing in newspapers, for instance, like delivering speeches. There are a lot of continuities that I see between 19th and 20th century Black radicalism. So that's one of the biggest things that I would say I learned in terms of content.

So typically when I wrap up an interview, I always ask, you know, what are you working on now? You teased us a little bit with that at the beginning because, again, this Marianne Shad Carey was a side quest that turned into the main quest. So...

Talk about the main quest a little bit, what you're working on and the status and when we're going to have it and all of those things. Yeah, absolutely. I am currently writing my, I'm returning to my main quest, currently writing my monograph, Redefining Radicalism, Black Women, Public Intellectuals in the 19th Century. So this project is looking broadly at how Black women are

articulated Black radicalism during the early, mid, and late 19th century. I'm focusing broadly on the same women who I referenced before, as well as Sarah Parker Riemann and other figures as they might appear appropriately. This book is going to be looking at Black women's labor, internationalism, their arguments for citizenship, their arguments for women's suffrage, and their arguments in favor of

or rather their arguments for why they should be activists too. So in some ways it's expanding on the themes that emerged from this Shad Carey reader and looking at how a set of other Black women intellectuals took up similar questions during that time period. This project is broadly speaking one that looks at how early Black women

laid the foundation for Black radicalism, how they were invested in Black radicalism, how they were in dialogue with one another, as well as Black male thinkers and activists of the same time period. And so this is one that I'm really excited about to continue working on it and to dive into some other figures just as deeply as I've dived into Shad Carey. Yeah.

Yeah. And are you finding at a, you know, at a generalized level that a lot of these archives are distributed in the same way that Chad Carey's was, is?

Yes, they certainly are. I will say that the Moreland Spingarn Research Center has a lot of great material. I would also like to give a shout out to the Center for Black Digital Research at Penn State, because they have developed a Black Women's Organizing Archive of...

19th and 20th century women writers that can help people who are researching some figures, whether they're the people who are mentioned or other folks, can help people identify where those archives are located. Something that would have been very helpful when I was in the early stages of working on this Shad Carey book, something that can still be helpful to researchers around the world. Right.

For the next person that's researching Marianne Shad Carey. Yes, absolutely. We'll be able to get that. Well, fantastic. So this book is Marianne Shad Carey Essential Writings of a 19th Century Black Radical Feminist by Nika D. Denny. You can find Dr. Denny at nikadenny.com.

And I'm your host, Sullivan Summer. You can find me online at SullivanSummer.com, on Instagram at TheSullivanSummer, and on Substack at Sullivan Summer. And that is where Dr. Denny and I are going right now to continue our conversation. Thank you so much for tuning in to the New Books Network.

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