Maintained the nation's first private secondary school for "Young Ladies of Color" for over a year and a half - Connecticut's State Heroine

Prudence Crandall was the daughter of Quaker parents who became a symbol in the cause of African American education and abolitionism. In 1831, she opened the Canterbury Female Boarding School at the request of local citizens. A year later she admitted Sarah Harris (1815-1879), the daughter of a prosperous African American farmer, who had completed the district school and wished to train to be a teacher.

There was an explosive reaction in the community, forcing the school to close. Crandall, however, was determined to do what she could "to benefit the people of color" and began to recruit pupils among middle-class African American families throughout the Northeast for the first boarding and teacher training school for black young women. Prudence's dedication to the education of these young women is exemplary and in the face of much opposition, she kept her school open from April of 1883 until September of the following year.

The town of Canterbury, however, did everything it could to block her efforts, finally passing a law barring the establishment of any school that taught out-of-state African Americans and prohibiting the teaching of "any colored people...not inhabitants" of Connecticut. Crandall was arrested under the terms of this act, and her case became a "cause celebre" throughout the country. She was convicted in a second trial which was later overturned on a technicality.

Sadly, townspeople continued to vandalize the school. After a mob assault in 1834, Crandall moved to Illinois with her husband, the Rev. Calvin Philleo, an abolitionist and Baptist minister. She did not, however, abandon her commitment to education. There she conducted a school in her home and aided the movement for women's rights.

Crandall continued her interest in the reform movement until her death in 1874. The Connecticut legislature did penance for its earlier prosecution of Crandall by granting her a small pension in 1886. Arguments from her trials were used in the U.S. Supreme Court's school desegregation decision of 1954.