Born in Hopkinton, Rhode Island, on September 3, 1803, Prudence Crandall grew up in a Quaker household and was educated at the New England Friends╒ Boarding School in Providence. After a brief period of teaching school in Plainfield, Connecticut, she moved to Canterbury, Connecticut, and there in 1831 opened a private girls╒ academy, which was soon recognized is one of the best of its kind in the state. When early in 1833 she admitted to the school a young African-American girl, she was immediately the focus of heated protest and controversy. In March 1833, on the advice of William Lloyd Garrison and others, she announced that she would the next month open on the same premises a new school for ╥young ladies and little misses of color.╙ The local citizenry were even more outraged and embarked upon a campaign of unremitting persecution and ostracism. In May the Connecticut legislature was prodded into enacting a bill forbidding the establishment of schools for nonresident African-Americans without the consent of local authorities.
In a case that received wide publicity and enlisted the aid of Arthur Tappan, Samuel J. May, and other prominent abolitionists, Crandall was indicted and convicted under the so-called ╥Black Law╙ and imprisoned until July 1834, when the court of appeals reversed her conviction on technical grounds. Local opposition increased to the point of mob violence, however, and in September 1834 she was forced to give up her school. With her husband, Calvin Philleo, a Baptist minister whom she had married in August, she moved to Illinois; after his death in 1874 she went to live with her brother in Elk Falls, Kansas. In 1886 the Connecticut legislature attempted amends with a small pension. She died in Elk Falls, Kansas, on January 28, 1890.
