American educator Prudence Crandall (1803-1890) made one of the early experiments in providing educational facilities for African American girls.

Prudence Crandall was born on Sept. 3, 1803, in Hopkinton, R.I., to a Quaker family. Her father moved to a farm at Canterbury, Conn., in 1813. She attended the Friends' Boarding School at Providence, R.I., and later taught in a school for girls at Plainfield, Conn. In 1831 she returned to Canterbury to run the newly established Canterbury Female Boarding School. When Sarah Harris, daughter of a free African American farmer in the vicinity, asked to be admitted to the school in order to prepare for teaching other African Americans, she was accepted. Immediately, the townspeople objected and pressured to have Harris dismissed.

Crandall was familiar with the abolitionist movement and had read William Lloyd Garrison's Liberator. Faced with the town's resolutions of disapproval, she met with abolitionists in Boston, Providence...