Prudence Crandall (September 3, 1803 – January 27, 1890) was an American schoolteacher and activist. She ran the Canterbury Female Boarding School in Canterbury, Connecticut, which became the first known school for African American girls ("young Ladies and little Misses of color") in the United States led by a white woman. She was the sister of Reuben Crandall, the defendant in the Trial of Reuben Crandall.
In 1832, when Crandall admitted Sarah Harris, a 20-year-old African American woman, to her school, she created what can be considered the first known integrated classroom in the United States. Following the decision, parents of white students began to withdraw their daughters. She left Connecticut and never lived there again. She had two brothers, Reuben and Hezekiah, and a sister, Almira. When she was about 10, her father moved the family to nearby Canterbury, Connecticut.
Crandall attended the New England Yearly Meeting School, a Quaker boarding school in Providence, Rhode Island when she was 22. She became a Baptist in 1830.
Canterbury Female Boarding School
Establishment
In 1831 she and her sister purchased the Elisha Payne house to establish the Canterbury Female Boarding School, at the request of Canterbury's elite residents, to educate young girls in the town. As principal of the boarding school, Prudence Crandall was praised for her ability to educate young girls. The school flourished and was well received in the community. [King James translation; the same quotation is on the title page of Charles Crawford's Observations upon Negro-slavery, 1790]
She then admitted Sarah, establishing what is considered to be the first integrated school in the United States.
As word of the school spread, African American families began arranging enrollment of their daughters in Crandall's academy. On April 1, 1833, twenty African American girls from Boston, Providence, New York, Philadelphia, and the surrounding areas in Connecticut arrived at Miss Crandall's School for Young Ladies and Little Misses of Color. He predicted the destruction of the town if Crandall's school for colored children succeeded. Frost claimed that the boarding school would encourage "social equality and intermarriage of whites and blacks." To this, her response was "Moses had a black wife." In July, Crandall was arrested and placed in the county jail for one night—she refused to be bonded out, as she wished the public to know she was being jailed. (A Vermont newspaper reported it under the headline "Shame on Connecticut".) The next day she was released under bond to await her trial.
A second trial in Superior Court decided against the school, and the case was taken to the Supreme Court of Errors (now called the Connecticut Supreme Court) on appeal in July 1834. On September 9, 1834, a group of townspeople broke almost ninety window glass panes using heavy iron bars.
Later years
At the suggestion of William Garrison, who raised the money from "various antislavery societies", Francis Alexander painted a portrait of Crandall in April 1834. She had to go to Boston for the sittings, where she "became the center of attention at abolitionist parties and gatherings each evening. The Boston abolitionists honored her as a true heroine of the antislavery cause." She separated from Philleo in 1842 after his "deteriorating physical and mental health" led him to be abusive. with "a host of good books in her house", quoted her as follows: