Woman of the Day teacher Prudence Crandall, born OTD in 1803 in Rhode Island, opened a private school for girls in Connecticut acknowledged to be one of the best in the state, till she admitted a new pupil and all hell broke loose. She was harangued, arrested, dragged repeatedly through the courts, threatened with violence and hounded till she left town.
Yet it all started off so well. Prudence, raised as a Quaker by a family of abolitionists, enjoyed a good education and regarded teaching as a vocation. Soon after she completed her teacher training, she became a Baptist which meant that the Bible became her ultimate religious authority.
In 1831, she and her sister bought a large house and established the Canterbury Female Boarding School with the approval of affluent townspeople. It flourished, providing about forty girls with a good, well-rounded education, and all was set fair till September 1832 when Sarah Harris, daughter of a free African American man, applied to be admitted. Prudence was hesitant but turned to her Bible for guidance. It fell open at Ecclesiastes 4:1: “So I returned, and considered all the oppressions that are done under the sun: and behold the tears of such as were oppressed, and they had no comforter; and on the side of their oppressors there was power; but they had no comforter.”
“I contemplated for a while the manner in which I might best serve the people of color. As wealth was not mine, I saw no other means of benefiting them, than by imparting to those of my own sex that were anxious to learn, all the instruction I might be able to give, however small the amount.”
She accepted Sarah as a pupil. The other girls were relaxed about it but their parents were not. They withdrew their daughters from the school and it closed temporarily. When it reopened on the first Monday in April 1833 “for the reception of young Ladies and little Misses of color…Terms, $25 per quarter, one half paid in advance”, it had twenty new African American pupils from all over New England and was generating interest from others.
That’s when the trouble really started: town meetings, hostility, protests, pressure on Prudence to desist from jeopardising the safety of white people by encouraging “social equality and intermarriage of whites and blacks” (her riposte: "Moses had a black wife”), threats, intimidation and violence.
She remained steadfast - her brother described her as “a very obstinate girl” - but as the disorder escalated, the State of Connecticut finally acted. It passed a Black Law making the teaching of “any colored people...not inhabitants of Connecticut” unlawful unless permitted by the town. Prudence was arrested and spent a night in jail. She refused to be bailed but was released the next day.
Townspeople ostracised her, shopkeepers refused to serve her, the town doctor refused to treat her or her pupils, animal excrement was thrown into the school’s drinking water well and she had to fetch water from her father’s farm because the town council refused to allow her use of its water, and her students were threatened.
Prudence’s first trial on 22 August 1833 resulted in a hung jury. The second trial followed in October and she was convicted. This was overturned on a technicality by a higher court on appeal and finally, in July 1834, the case was dismissed. If the process was meant to be the punishment, it paled into insignificance in comparison with public reaction when she re-opened her school.
Wave after wave of mob violence was unleashed against the school. They threw rocks at the windows, smashing them all, and on one occasion, set fire to the building. She managed to keep the school open for a year in the face of unremitting hostility but in the end, fear of serious injury to her pupils left her with no choice.
Prudence closed the school in September 1834. In August the following year, she married a man who supported her views but she’d had enough of Canterbury and mass prejudice. They moved west and ended up in Kansas where she held classes in their home, and supported abolition and women’s suffrage.
And the aftermath? Several of her students went on to become teachers, Connecticut officially repealed the Black Law in 1838, Mark Twain offered to buy the school building and give it to her to live in but she declined because she wasn’t keen to return. Fifty-two years later, the Connecticut General Assembly formally apologised to Prudence and granted her a small pension in recognition of her work.
Prudence died in 1890 at the age of 86 but for a brief time, hers was the first integrated school in the USA.
“My whole life has been one of opposition.”
But not in vain, Prudence, not in vain.
One hundred and twenty years later, the arguments from your trials were used successfully in Brown v Board of Education, the landmark ruling of the US Supreme Court which ruled unanimously that racial segregation in public schools was a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. Shame on those who took so long to do the right thing.