This is the story of a woman who fought injustice in 1813, when Prudence Kendall was ten ye Her family moved from Hopkinton, Rhode Island, to a farm outside the prosperous of Canterbury, Connecticut.

Prudence loved farm life.

She, her two brothers and her little sister did chores and played along the Quint, a bi aided by her Quaker upbringing.

Prudence never lost the kind of stubbornn she questioned everything.

The progenitor of the Scramble c It was a man named Elder John Ca who got kicked out of Massachuse is some kind of badge of honor b Massachusetts was ruled by the P which I think So clearly there was a tradition of dissent within th My legend has it that prudence t My father was talking with a neighbor about business and he ordered me back to the ho I told him my brother Hezekiah doesn't have to leave.

Why should I?

My mother said, It's important f to learn about business, but not me because I am a girl.

It didn't make any sense.

It still doesn't.

My whole life has been one of op After graduation from a Quaker s in Rhode Island, prudence came back to Connecticu and taught in local schools.

She was then asked to establish a privat to provide higher education for young women in Canterbury.

She agreed, and in 1831, with the support of her communit the 28 year old teacher paid $50 in cash and was given a 1500 dol to buy one of Canterbury's finest houses on the town green.

She had a secure background.

Her family was well known in tha They were secure.

They were related to some of the leading people.

Her next door neighbor, Andrew J was an attorney, a state legisla and the most influential man in Canterbury.

Realizing that the school would attract the daughters of the most prominent families.

Judson Quickly joined the school's Board of Vis The school was a success, and by the end of 183 Jackson and his board reported, this school has given entire sat Prudence and her school were thr So a shocking event that had occ in Virginia the year before would not seem to have any conne to this idyllic life in 1831.

In a bloody slave rebellion, Nat and his followers had killed 54 white men, women and children.

His inspiration, he claimed, had come from reading the Bible.

And the easy argument that is ma that if you educate this group o you will have political turmoil.

And therefore, in order to keep that is not really there but is imagined and mythologized you are justified in keeping a particular segment of the popu in intellectual darkness.

At the same time, prudence is fr Black housekeeper Mariah Davis introduced Prudence to the Liber a new abolitionist newspaper dedicated to an immediate end to What I think has happened is tha Davis is taking the measure of P Crandall and has figured out this woman is someone who might to stand with us.

Among the papers contributors was Mariah Stewart, an eloquent African-American wom who insisted that racial equalit had to include women's equality and education.

These words went straight to pru His heart.

Come up.

In 1784, Connecticut was the first state to commit to gradual emancipatio But freedom from slavery did not social equality.

William Harris was a prosperous, free black farmer active in the abolitionist movem His son Charles was engaged to P His housekeeper, Mariah Davis, who had been permitted to sit in on some of Prudence classes.

And then in the fall of 1832, 19 year old Sarah Harris, a close friend of Mariah Davis, asked Prudence if she could enroll in her schoo as Sarah put it, to get a little more lea if possible, enough to teach colored children And if you admit me to your scho I shall forever be under the greatest obligation But if you think it will be the of injuring you, I will not insist on the favor.

Sarah Harris dreamed of becoming a teacher, but she was well aware of what could happen to Crandell if she were admitted.

Prudence took several days to make her de She knew that if she admitted Sa she could lose her school and everything she had worked fo But Prudence believed that slavery was a sin and so wa keeping Sarah from the knowledge that could make her truly free.

Sarah became a day school studen So the idea that everyone needed level of literacy was a given.

But higher education implies social equalit And the high school that Prince had opened first for the white w in 1831 was the highest level of available.

Prudence was visited by a delegation of irate matrons If you do not send this girl awa as a demand, we will withdraw our daughters and your school wi Prudence calmly replies.

It might sink in, for I should not turn her ou In an unusual move for a woman of that Prudence travels alone to Boston to meet William Lloyd Garrison, abolitionist and publisher of The Liberator.

To ask him if it would be possib to start a school for young blac I made up my mind that if it were possible, I would teach colored Girls excl 25 year old William Lloyd Garris hated by many in the North and south, was described as a crazy fanatic.

His fledgling newspaper, The Liberator, was being kept af almost entirely by African-American subscribers.

Here is someone who is a champion of immediate a who says, I don't caution me.

Don't invite me to be modest.

Don't expect me to be demure.

If a house is on fire, I have to put it out.

And for Garrison, all people deserved rights.

Women and men.

South, there was a reward for Ga capture, dead or alive.

In the And the Liberator was blamed for causing the Bloody Nat Turner re This was the man Prudence went to for advice.

So Garrison gave her letters of introduction to black ministe and black community leaders in P and in New York City.

She was very, very stubborn.

She didn't compromise, never thought of compromising.

And in this ways is one of the r that she and William Lloyd Garri worked so well together.

It was just at the beginning of his career.

He never compromised.

He never negotiated.

He never backed down.

In fact, he did exactly what she He was always upping the ante.

With a list of black preachers and their parishioners.

Prudence begins a daring campaig to recruit African-American stud They seem to feel much for the education of their daugh I think it was an extraordinary act of courage on the part of the parents of these African-American girls to entrust their daughters, their precious children, to a strange woman, a strange wh They wanted their daughters to get an education, and they wanted their daughters to get a good education.

And so they were willing to trust Crandell, which shows t she must have made quite an impr Prudence is visited by the most influential men of the village.

If black students were all place an equal footing, they insisted property and life would no longer be safe And besides, they would too.

This will lead to intermarriage.

Instead of bursting into tears, as the men had expected, Prudenc Moses had a black wife.

The infuriated men stalked out.

An advertisement placed in the L announced that on April 1st, 183 the school would reopen for the purpose of educating you and little masses of color.

15 men signed the ad for Crandel Of those 15 men, eight were black and seven were So the document endorsing Crande is really unique.

This is a phenomenal document, which at least in my experience, is unequaled in the entire annals of abolitio from the 1830s on to the Civil W for its equality of representati of black and white.

Our sons and daughters will be r if this school continues.

Thunders entity Judson.

At an emergency town meeting held in the Congregational Churc in 19th century America, women were not allowed to speak in pub So Prudence had to ask her frien Reverend Samuel May and Arnold B to speak for her as the men tried to address the excited They were shouted down and threatened with violence by using a proper law firm.

1650 students.

Black students could be designat vagrants.

They threatened to find you will again, will find you again.

And multiply that by your 20 stu you'll be penniless.

And she she knew this.

On April 12th, 1833, the first out-of-state student to arrive by Stagecoach from Pro Rhode Island.

It was 17 year old and Eliza Ham A day after her arrival, the aut threatened prudence with heavy f and if the fines were not paid, Analyzer could be whipped And Eliza replies that she would gladly put up with a whipping if it meant she could get an edu How extraordinary that one would be willing to ris being whipped publicly half nake in order to go to school.

African-Americans an education at this time was like giving them a magic wan I mean, kids now sometimes don't want to go t They don't see what school will do for them.

But those children saw all too c that going to school was the passport to a whole new In the end, the pauper law didn' because several wealthy friends of prudence promised to pay the to $10,000 in fines.

Prudence was delighted when Sara her first African American stude returned to the school.

In the midst of this affliction.

I am as happy as at any moment i So I think it's important to und the integrity of Randall's inten and the integrity and bravery of those students who were ready to come into the town of Canterb that did not want them there.

One prospective student, after enduring a string of insul on her long stagecoach trip, arrived in Brooklyn, Conne Since no one was willing to drive her to Canterbury, she hoisted her baggage on her s and walked the six miles to the I think this story has been misc as a story about noble white woman teaching the oppressed to read.

But it is not that it is a white trying to help black women to achieve the intellectual equa that will enable them to achieve social equality.

None of her students were people who had just escaped from slaver Her students came from the very free, black middle class.

More students arrived from hundreds of miles away from Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Massachusetts.

When most Canterbury shopkeepers refused to sell them food and his father and brother hauled provisions to the school.

Gangs of boys followed the girls everywhere, blowing in and shouting insults.

Judson lobbied for a new state l that would close down the school and run prudence out of Canterbu These pupils congregate here, he said, under the pretense of educating them.

But really to scatter, firebrand and death among brethren of our The white men of Canterbury did black women to be tempted, their One of the arguments against the was that it was going to lead to interracial marriage.

And one of the students did rema I don't think I'd want to be wit any of these men after the way they were treated in the village Prudence, his father, petitioned the Connecticut legislators.

I entreat the members of this as to remember those self-evident t that all mankind are created free and equal, whether they are white or black.

was successful, and the passage of the black law Jackson as it came to be known, was loudly celebrated on the tow Green.

The black law made it a crime for any African- to enter Connecticut from anothe for the purpose of obtaining an The large fines Judson hoped would bankrupt the I was just rereading the full te yesterday of the Black Law, and it is truly to the eternal disgrace of Connecticut to have tried to limit people for purposes of education.

But if you read the law carefull it is quite clear that what they is social equality.

On June 27th, 1833, prudence was served with a warra for the crime of teaching colore who did not live in Connecticut under arrest.

The deputy sheriff drove her to jail in Brooklyn, Connecticut.

Her trial would take place in Au But Judson and the other men wer that she would never actually go Surely someone would pay her $15 It would be embarrassing for the if they were seen as bullies, locking up a respectable young woman for teaching childre I am only afraid they will not put me in jail.

This was exactly what Prudence had planned for.

Prudence did spend the night in accompanied by her friend Anna B The next afternoon at 4:00, the two ladies were released and as Father George Benson paid the bail as planned.

People across the nation who were reading about this were that these civilized gentlemen w a woman of her background in edu and in the common jail.

But the harassment did not stop.

A rock was thrown through the fr window.

Putin set it in a place of honor on the mantle as if it were a tr While Putin awaits the trial, the 17 pupils in this grand old continue with their classes.

They are described by one visito as having better claims to grace and beauty than the majority of and matrons of the district.

When the trial began, the prosecuting attorney, Andrew Jackson, argued that the black l was justified because African-Am were not citizens and therefore they had no rights Putin says attorney William Ellsworth replied, All black people are citizens.

They were born in America.

They fought for freedom and the American Revolution.

And there is nothing in the Cons that says they are not full fled citizens.

The black law is unconscious, at and breaking.

It is no crime.

The jury couldn't agree on a ver Her case needed to be retried and prudence, guilt or innocence would once again depend upon whether white Americ believed that African Americans were citi The harassment against the school continued.

It was discovered that someone had polluted the sc and the girls were denied clean water by all of their neig Undaunted, Putin's father hauled barrels of water to the school from his farm.

She just didn't know how to give She just didn't.

And the abolitionists were like And the suffragettes, too.

They would go decade after decad after decade, defeat after defea After defeat.

Only just didn't s In an English class, one of her pupils wrote.

Miss Crandall reminded us to not return evil f On October 3rd, 1833, the second trial found prudence, and prudence as lawyers filed an asking the Connecticut Supreme Court of Errors to review the ca Prudence and her students were not defeat At the school, the girls sat around the firepla Love and union seemed to bind our little circle of sisterly affection, wrote one of the girls.

And in November, there was more with the whole school invited.

Sarah Harris married George Fair Also the Reverend Calvin Sileo c calling on their beloved teacher He was a widower with two young Was this a new romance?

These speculations were interrup when on January 28th, 1834, a student smelled smoke in one of the rooms.

Frederick Oni, an African-Americ who was the handyman for the sch grabbed an ax and began chopping out a part of the exter revealing a roaring fire.

Realizing that the fire could al to their homes, several townspeople came to owner's assi and the flames were extinguished Prudence was shaken.

The fire had been deliberately s All of a sudden, when somebody sets a fire in you and they are trying to burn down over the heads of you, and some 20 young women.

That's serious.

But Prudence and her pupils deci they would continue with their s Letters of encouragement began arriving from all over the And because of voter disapproval Jackson lost his reelection in the Connecticut legislature.

There was also other news.

Race riots had broken out in Phi and New York City.

Race riots like this were not uncommon in the 1830s.

They broke out all up and down t Coast, and there were terrible r I mean, the homes of African-Ame were burned.

People were beaten up on the str People were lynched.

It was a horrible time.

On July 28, 1834, the Connecticut Supreme Court of heard prudence.

This case and ruled prudence not due to a tiny technical mistake in the arrest Prudence had won, but the civil rights of African were still precarious and the bl had not been struck down.

On August 12th, 1834, Prudence and Reverend Calvin Philip were married.

They were not happy.

It would seem he was not the mos man in the world.

And at certain points really lat in his life, completely unhinged Why would she marry someone like I think she was very frightened at that time.

She was felt very, very vulnerab She wrote a poem once that said something that I wish I had a lover.

I'm longing to be loved.

And I think she was a woman.

She wanted to be loved.

After their honeymoon, Prudence to Canterbury with her new famil She was no longer in danger of going to prison.

She loved her stepchildren, her students and h The future looked promising.

On September 9th, 1834, an angry mob attacked the This became the final act of enr who had been beaten by a stubbor and 20 young female students.

My heart glowed with indignation I felt ashamed of Canterbury.

Ashamed of Connecticut.

Ashamed of my country.

Ashamed of my color, wrote Rever Samuel May after viewing the wre reluctantly, the girls were told that the school would have to be They loved their teacher.

And despite the harassment, one student described the school as a place of communion with hea They sadly packed their belongin Prudence and her family moved aw from Canterbury first to upstate then Mendota, Illinois, and finally to a farm in Outfall Kansas, in 1838.

The black law was struck down in 1868.

Connecticut was the first state the 14th Amendment to the Consti making it clear that African Ame were indeed full citizens.

The same defense prudence invoke when she broke the black law.

The school is sometimes presented as a failure because it only lasted for 17 mo April of 1833 to September of 18 I take issue with this idea that the school was a failure.

I think the school was a resound success.

Any time you could keep a school for 17 months when every day you were subjected to vigilante When a law is passed against you by the assembly of your state, when all of the elected official of your town and all of the law enforcement officials of your town are on official record disapproving of your presence, and you manage to keep that scho 17 months.

That's an achievement.

In 1886, Canterbury and the state of Connecticut made an official apology to prud and voted to an annuity of $400 Philip Pearl, who was one of the who had had a great deal to do with writing the infamous said it was one of the worst thi he'd ever did.

How could he have done that?

He He says something about he wishe he could have shed tears of bloo because he wished he had never d Mark Twain proposed that he would like to buy the ho and give it to her, and she said thank you.

Home is where the heart is, and I think I'd like to stay her But could I have some of your bo and a photograph?

So he sent those.

He sent those along.

But she did get a formal, writte public apology from the state of Connecticut.

You know, she starts as someone who's not able to tur someone who wants to learn.

Her first student is not a profe abolitionist.

She's someone who wants to learn more.

So she can teach.

So that she can bring others into a world of light and learning and enable and empo And it has everything to do with creating a just society.

It's not a political move, but education is inherently poli because that's the most for some the most emancipatory tool of th You break the shackle, but if yo not where you're going, what's t But you break the shackle and you can write the manifesto.

You know what can what can stand in your way?

Almost 50 years after Sarah Harris, Fairweather asked Pruden to help her get a little more le The young woman who started it all made the long journey to Kansas to visit her old teach Within a year of their joyful re Sarah died at the age of 67.

Prudence Crandall lived 87 years fighting to the end of her life for the equality of both women and African-Americ