Mary Ann Camberton Shadd Cary was an American-Canadian anti-slavery activist, journalist, publisher, teacher, and lawyer. She was the first black woman publisher in North America and the first woman publisher in Canada. She was also the second black woman to attend law school in the United States. Mary Shadd established the newspaper Provincial Freeman in 1853, which was published weekly in southern Ontario. it advocated equality, integration, and self-education for black people in Canada and the United States.

The Provincial Freeman was a Canadian weekly newspaper founded by Mary Ann Shadd that published from 1853 through 1857. She was married to Thomas F. Cary in 1856, becoming Mary Ann Shadd Cary. It was the first newspaper published by an African-American female and Canada's first by a woman of any ethnicity. The paper's motto was "Devoted to anti-slavery, temperance, and general literature."