Boy this sounds familiar, " Before the firestorm ended, Crandall would be vilified and threatened in the most vicious and disgusting terms." So many in Croydon were vilified for wanting to do what was best of the parents and children of Croydon. The first battle was won in court, we are waiting with baited breath, for the response from the judge. Hopefully, he will do what is in the best interest of the children and not the government employees. Government teachers and those associated with them go by the mantra, "We must maintain the status quo even if it means keeping children in under performing and failing schools."
Cathy
"How would children learn without government? That’s a perennial question asked by many who assume, mistakenly, that government is an indispensable necessity to the business of education. Prudence Crandall in her day would undoubtedly respond with another query: “How will children get an education with government?” -- Prudence Crandall is this week's Real Hero at FEE.org: "
She Dared to Teach Black Girls
Real Heroes: Prudence Crandall
Friday, April 01, 2016
On April Fool’s Day in 1833, the little hamlet of Canterbury, Connecticut, was in an uproar. A new private school had opened that day, and it was no joke. A few blocks away, with local politicians leading the charge, angry townspeople gathered at the Congregational Church to demand that the state legislature pass a law to put it out of business. The air was thick with wild denunciations of the school’s owner and operator, a 29-year-old teacher and entrepreneur named Prudence Crandall.
What was so reprehensible about this school? Just two years earlier, Crandall had opened her first one, in the same building, to universal acclaim. She and her sister Almira had bought and paid for the spacious, Georgian-style 1805 mansion with a $500 down payment and a $1,500 mortgage. They called it the Canterbury Female Boarding School. The reviews from the families of its more than two dozen white female students were stellar.
However, the new school that Prudence opened on April 1, 1833, carried a name that sent shockwaves throughout Connecticut and prompted the April First commotion: Miss Crandall’s School for Young Ladies and Little Misses of Color.
Prudence Crandall had done the unthinkable. She was determined to run a school exclusively for — hold on to your hats — young black girls. They would come from among free black families in New England, where slavery had largely died out and the nascent abolitionist movement was about to blossom. Before the firestorm ended, Crandall would be vilified and threatened in the most vicious and disgusting terms.
Racism in Connecticut? Weren’t such ugly sentiments confined to the Deep South? Not at all. In America’s early days, it was as widespread in all parts of the country as it was in most of the world — which is to say, it was common. Indeed, slavery itself was not foreign to New England. In his fascinating biography, Prudence Crandall’s Legacy, historian Donald E. Williams Jr. writes,
Many of the free blacks Prudence Crandall
saw in northeastern Connecticut were former slaves. Farmers in her
hometown of Canterbury owned slaves through the end of the 1700s.
Throughout the eighteenth century, slave ships regularly brought
captured blacks from Africa to harbors in the Northeast, including ports
in Connecticut and Newport, Rhode Island. Newport was one of the
busiest slave-trading ports in America during the 1700s; slaves were
held in pens on the Newport waterfront until they could be sold and
transported throughout New England. There were 951 slaves in Connecticut
according to the national census of 1800. By the time Prudence Crandall
began her teaching career in 1830, the number had dropped to
twenty-five as a result of anti-slavery sentiment and legislation that
slowly phased out slavery in Connecticut.
It wasn’t just whites who owned slaves in early America. From 1654 right through the Civil War, free black people owned fellow blacks in every one of the 13 original states and later in almost every other state as well. As late as 1830, according to Harvard historian Henry Louis Gates, 3,776 free American blacks owned 12,907 slaves.
To read the rest of the story go to Fee.org.
