Museum Honors Connecticut Teacher Who Opened Doors to Black Girls : History: Prudence Crandall had to battle violent prejudice and unfair laws to keep her groundbreaking school running.

When a strong-willed white schoolteacher in 1833 opened New England’s first academy for black girls, she was tormented by her neighbors, made an outlaw by the state Legislature and even jailed.

Today, the clapboard house where Prudence Crandall operated her boarding school is a museum, a monument to one woman’s courage and a reminder of a troubling episode in Connecticut history.

“What is so ironic is that blacks had to struggle to be educated right here in Connecticut,” said state Sen. Margaret Morton, a black Democrat from Bridgeport who championed efforts to restore the house.

“You always hear about that kind of discrimination happening in the South, but no one ever thinks that it could happen here in Yankee Connecticut,” Morton said.

After more than a century of obscurity, Crandall recently has been recognized as an important figure in both black and women’s history. She was the subject of the TV movie “She Stood Alone.” Her biography was published last year, and the Crandall House itself is awaiting designation as a national historic landmark.

In the summer of 1831, the town of Canterbury in eastern Connecticut asked Crandall to open a private academy for boys and girls. Crandall, who had moved to Canterbury with her family from Hopkinton, R.I., was a Quaker who had taught in district schools in Plainfield and Lisbon.

Crandall bought a house on the town green and took in about 50 students, offering a much more rigorous curriculum than the local public school, which taught only the three R’s.

Everything went well until the fall of 1832, when Crandall accepted 20-year-old Sarah Harris as a pupil.

Harris was black. She wanted to become a schoolteacher and had learned about the academy from her best friend, Marsha Davis, a free black woman who was a house servant at the school.

The community was incensed. Although Connecticut didn’t have an active slave trade at the time, there were still a few dozen slaves left in the state. Slavery would be legal in the state for another 15 years, and townsfolk didn’t want any blacks at Canterbury’s best school. When Crandall refused to expel Harris, many parents withdrew their children.

“Prudence realized that the town would oppose what she was doing, but morally she could not refuse Sarah Harris,” said Kazimiera Koslowski, curator of the Crandall House.

After conferring with some abolitionists, including her friend William Lloyd Garrison, Crandall decided to reopen the school for “young ladies and misses of color.” She dismissed the few remaining white students and enrolled about 20 black girls, mostly from out-of-state middle-class families. Prudence Crandall’s Female Boarding School opened on April 1, 1833.

The community responded with rage. Residents threw manure down the well and tried to set fire to the building. They hurled epithets at the girls, and rocks, eggs and mud at the schoolhouse. The Canterbury First Congregational Church refused to let the young women attend services. Most stores refused to sell to Crandall or her students.

“Today’s equivalent to Prudence’s action would be someone coming into a nice New England town and saying they wanted to establish a refuge for the homeless right on the town green,” said Christopher Collier, Connecticut’s state historian.

When Crandall refused to sell or relocate the schoolhouse, townspeople petitioned the state General Assembly to take action. On May 23, 1833, the General Assembly enacted the Black Law, making it a crime to educate “colored persons who are not inhabitants of this state.”

She was arrested one month later and spent a night in jail before being bailed out by abolitionist friends. Her first trial ended in a hung jury, but she was found guilty at a second trial. She immediately appealed, challenging the constitutionality of the Black Law.

“Prudence was taking her students to a level where most of the population didn’t think they should be,” Koslowski said. “It’s like South Africa. You give people power when you educate them, so others are afraid of that.”

Her conviction was overturned on a technicality by the Court of Errors in August, 1834.

But on the night of Sept. 9, 1834, a mob attacked the school with clubs and bars, smashing windows and menacing those inside. Afterward, the town sheriff said there was nothing he could do.

Crandall, fearing for the safety of her students, reluctantly decided to close the school. The decision was so heartbreaking that she couldn’t face her pupils. A local minister told the girls the next morning.

“If she had been a male, or if the school had been 5 miles out of town, she probably could have stayed,” Collier said. “She was very stubborn, very courageous and very committed to her students.”

Crandall sold the house, moved around New England for a few years and eventually settled in Kansas.

The General Assembly repealed the Black Law in 1839. It moved to right its wrong against Crandall half a century later, voting in 1886 to pay her an annual pension of $400.

“It was their way of saying sorry,” Koslowski said.

The pension was awarded after a petition campaign led by Mark Twain, who lived in Hartford at the time and had corresponded with Crandall. Twain admired her so much that he offered to buy the Canterbury schoolhouse back for her. When Crandall said that she would be happier in Kansas, he settled for hanging her portrait on a wall of his home.

Crandall remained active in education and the women’s and temperance movements until her death in 1890.

The Connecticut Historical Society bought the house from a private family in 1969. Restoration didn’t begin until a decade later. The museum was finally dedicated in 1984.