Prudence Crandall

Janice Rule plays this lady, Prudence Crandall. She was a Quaker schoolteacher, who in Connecticut in the early 1830s shook up the state by opening a special school.

The Quakers, of all the various religious sects in America, was the most notable one in confronting slavery. They fought it. The first notable anti-Slavery writer and personality was John Woolman of Pennsylvania. It was a tradition that eventually involved Ms Crandall. Her school was for educating young African-American girls.

The story is a bitter one, as Prudence faced bigotry from the state and most of her neighbors, ending with the destruction of the school. It is memorialized in the state now, but it was a terrible act of bigotry in it's day. But then, contemporary to this incident, young William Lloyd Garrison was mobbed in Boston for his publication, THE LIBERATOR.