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Prudence Crandall

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After Crandall decided to admit girls of color into her school, the parents of the white children began to withdraw their support. When Crandall continued to operate her academy, the state legislature passed a law prohibiting education of black students from outside the state unless specifically authorized by the town. Crandall won the court case, but Canterbury vandals burned her school. She closed it and left the area in 1834 after marrying Rev. Calvin Philleo, a Baptist preacher. Later widowed, she settled with a brother in Kansas in the late 1870s. In 1886, two decades after the end of the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, Connecticut passed a resolution honoring Crandall and providing her with a pension; she died a few years later.

Establishment of the boarding school.

After having graduated from the Friends' Boarding School in Providence, Rhode Island, Prudence Crandall taught a school in the neighboring town of Plainfield. In 1831, she purchased a house to establish the Canterbury Female Boarding School, at the request of Canterbury's aristocratic residents, to educate young girls in the town. As principle of the female boarding school, Prudence Crandall was deemed successful in her ability to educate young girls ,and the school flourished until September of 1832.

taught a variety of classical subjects, including reading, writing, arithmetic, English grammar, geography, history, natural and moral philosophy, chemistry, astronomy, drawing and painting, music and the piano, and the French language. The students were required to pay $25 per quarter, half in advance. This money covered tuition, board, and washing, while books and stationery were purchased and provided to the girls at a discounted price.

In the summer of 1831, Prudence Crandall was asked by a group of Cantebury citizens

Public Backlash

In response, a committee of prominent white men in the town ,Rufus Adams, Daniel Frost Jr., Andrew Harris, R. Fenner, attempted to convince Crandall that her school for young women of color would be detrimental to the safety of the white people in the town of Canterbury. Frost claimed that the boarding school would encourage "social equality and intermarriage of whites and blacks."