Prudence Crandall
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Prudence Crandall (September 3, 1803 – January 28, 1890), a schoolteacher raised as a Quaker, stirred controversy with her education of African-American girls in Canterbury, Connecticut. Her private school, opened in the fall of 1831, was boycotted when she admitted a 17-year-old African-American female student in the autumn of 1833, resulting in what is widely regarded as the first integrated classroom in the United States.
She is Connecticut's official State Heroine.
Prudence Crandall was born on September 3, 1803 to Pardon and Esther Carpenter Crandall, a Quaker couple in the Hope Valley area in the town of Hopkinton, Rhode Island. At the age of 17, her father decided to move the family to the small town of Canterbury, Connecticut. She attended the Friends' Boarding School in Providence, Rhode Island and later taught in a school for girls in Canterbury. In 1831, she returned to run the newly established Canterbury Female Boarding School, which she purchased with her sister Almira.
In the fall of 1832, a young woman by the name of Sarah Harris, the daughter of a free African American farmer in the local community, asked to be accepted to the school to prepare for teaching other African Americans. Her father owned a small farm near Canterbury, and Harris even attended the same district school as the white girls who were attending Crandall's school as teenagers.
Although she was uncertain of the repercussions that this would cause, Crandall eventually allowed Harris to attend her school. Many prominent townspeople objected and pressured to have Harris dismissed from the school, but Crandall refused. Families of the current students removed their daughters.
Consequently, Crandall ceased teaching white girls altogether and opened up her school strictly to African American girls. Crandall temporarily closed the school and began openly recruiting students on March 2, 1833, when William Lloyd Garrison, a supporter of the school, placed advertisements for new pupils in his newspaper The Liberator. Her advertisement announced that on the first Monday of April 1833 she would open a school “for the reception of young ladies and little misses of color, ... Terms, $25 per quarter, one half paid in advance.” In the list of references were Arthur Tappan, Samuel J. May, William Lloyd Garrison, and Arnold Buffum.
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