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  Prudence Crandall (1803-1890)
Sarah Harris Fayerweather (1812-1878)
How racist hatred touched two lives

  By CHRIS POON
Journal-Bulletin Staff Writer

The year was 1832. Tuition at Prudence Crandall's boarding school "for young ladies and little misses" in Canterbury, Conn., was a modest $18 a term.

Crandall, who was born in Hopkinton, offered a cultured education, including classes in moral philosophy, music, drawing and "French, taught by a gentleman."

Her efforts to groom women into young scholars were praised in the well- to-do village of Canterbury until Crandall entertained radical notions of admitting black students in her school.

Then trouble started.

Sarah Harris, 19, was the first black student to enroll, carrying hopes that she would one day become a teacher of her own people. Soon, parents of white girls threatened to remove their daughters from Crandall's tutelage.

Faced with the prospect of closing her school, Crandall wrote to abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison for advice.

"I wish to know your opinion respecting changing white scholars for colored ones. I have been for some months back determined, if possible, during the remaining part of my life to benefit the people of color," she wrote.

"I do not dare tell any of my neighbors about the contemplated change in my school, and I beg you, Sir, that you will not expose it to anyone, or it would ruin my present school."

In 1833, Crandall opened her school to "young Ladies and little Misses of color." Locals welcomed her 20 pupils by smearing cow manure on the steps, throwing eggs and stringing up a dead cat on the front gate.

In an effort to shut the school down, state Sen. Andrew Judson pushed through the legislature a "Black Law" that barred out-of-state black students.

Crandall went to jail and then to trial. A judge found her guilty of educating blacks, who he said were not subject to constitutional guarantees of equal rights.

She won her appeal, but closed the school in 1834 anyway after a mob attacked the school and broke all its windows.

Harris, Crandall's first black student, went on to marry blacksmith George Fayerweather of Rhode Island. They named their first child Prudence Crandall Fayerweather.

In 1853 the family moved into a house in Kingston built by George Fayerweather's father. The cottage is on the State and National Historic Registers.

Today, Joyce Stevos of Providence has her great-great-great aunt Sarah Harris Fayerweather to thank for her ambition.

Stevos is the director of strategic planning and professional development in the Providence school system. She's worked in the school department since graduating from Rhode Island College in 1965.

"I think about the kind of commitment she had and the kind of commitment I have to education," said Stevos, who is also president of the Rhode Island Black Heritage Society. "I think in terms of giving back because, if you've been fortunate in your life, you have to have a commitment to others."

Source: " 'An ornament and honor to her sex': New England Women from Valley Forge to Fenway Park," a history curriculum researched and written by Jane Lancaster.

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