PRUDENCE

CRANDALL (1803-1889)  , American school-teacher, was born, of Quaker parentage, at Hopkinton, Rhode Island, on the 3rd of September 1803 . She was educated in the Friends' school at Providence, R . I., taught school at Plainfield, Conn., and in 1831 established a private academy for girls at Canterbury, Windham county, Connecticut . By admitting a negro girl she lost her white patrons, and in March 1833, on the advice of William Lloyd Garrison and Samuel J . May (1797-1871), she opened a school for " young ladies and little misses of colour." For this she was bitterly denounced, not only in Canter-bury but throughout Connecticut, and was persecuted, boycotted and socially ostracized; measures were taken in the Canterbury town-meeting to break up the school, and finally in May 1833 the state legislature passed the notorious Connecticut " Black Law," prohibiting the establishment of schools for non-resident negroes in any city or township of Connecticut, without the consent of the local authorities . Miss Crandall, refusing to submit, was arrested, tried and convicted in the lower courts, whose verdict, however, was reversed on a technicality by the court of appeals in July 1834 . Thereupon the local opposition to her redoubled, and she was finally in September 1834 foFced to close her school . Soon afterward she married the Rev . Calvin Philleo . She died at Elk Falls, Kansas, on the 28th of January 1889 . The Connecticut Black Law was repealed in 1838 . Miss Crandall's attempt to educate negro girls at Canterbury attracted the attention of the whole country; and the episode is of considerable significance as showing the attitude of a New England community toward the negro at that time .

See J . C . Kimball's Connecticut Canterbury

Tale (Hartford,Conn., 1889), and Samuel J . May's Recollections of Our Anti-Slavery Conflict (Boston, 1869) .