Prudence Crandall was born in Hopkinton, Rhode Island, into a Quaker family. At the age of 10, she moved with her family to Canterbury, Connecticut. She attended the Black Hill Quaker School in Plainfield and later studied at the Quaker the New England Yearly Meeting boarding school. After graduation, Crandall taught in a school in Plainfield, and a few years later, she and her sister opened a private academy for girls in Canterbury. The school’s curriculum included subjects that at the time were not common for girls, such as history, geography, arithmetic, and grammar. Soon, it became known as one of the best schools in the state. In 1832, a black girl named Sarah Harris started studying in the school. By admitting her, Crandall established the first integrated school in the US. Many of the townspeople objected to this decision, putting pressure to dismiss Harris, and parents took out their daughters from the school. Following the backlash, and with the support of numerous prominent abolitionists such as Samuel J. May, William Lloyd Garrison, and Arthur Tappan, Crandall temporarily closed the school and reopened it as Miss Crandall’s School for Young Ladies and Little Misses of Color. She recruited black students from other states, publishing advertisements for the school in the abolitionist newspaper The Liberator. On April 1, 1833, 20 new students arrived at the first school in the US for black girls. The residences of Canterbury were furious, protested against the school, its students, and management. Crandall and the students received threats and suffered from violence, pelted with eggs, manure, and stones. Within a month since the school’s opening, the Connecticut legislature passed a “Black Law,” making it illegal to admit black students from other states without the consent of local authorities. Refusing to close the school or to stop teaching her non-residence students, Crandall was arrested and jailed for a night. Her first trial resulted in no verdict, the second she was convicted, but in her third trial before Connecticut Supreme Court, the case was dismissed. In response to the verdict, Canterbury’s residents set the school on fire, and the vandalism and harassment continued until Crandall felt she put her students in too much danger. On September 10th, 1834, Miss Crandall’s School for Young Ladies and Little Misses of Color was closed after 18 months of operation. A month earlier, Crandall married Calvin Philleo, a Baptist minister and a widower with three children. After the school was closed, they tried to live in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New York, and Illinois before separated in 1842 after he became abusive toward her. Crandall continued to work as an educator and a principal at a school in LaSalle County, Illinois. In 1838, Connecticut repealed the Black Law, and in 1886, when she was 63 years old, the state honored her with an annual pension of $400 (approximately $11,500 in today’s terms). In 1877, at the age of 74, she moved to live with her brother in Elk Falls, Kansas, where she died at 86. Read more...