CRANDALL, PRUDENCE (1803-189o), American school teacher of Quaker parentage, was born at Hopkinton, R.I., Sept. 3, 1803. She was educated in the Friends' school at Providence, taught at Plainfield, Conn., and in 1831 established a private academy for girls at Canterbury, Conn. Although the school was recognized as one of the best in the State, by admit ting a negro girl she lost her white patrons, and in March on the advice of William Lloyd Garrison and Samuel J. May, she opened a school for "young ladies and little misses of colour." For this she was persecuted, boycotted and socially ostracized; measures were taken in the Canterbury town-meeting to break up the school, and finally in May 1833 the State legislature passed the notorious Connecticut "Black Law," prohibiting the estab lishment of schools for non-resident negroes in any city or town ship of Connecticut without the consent of the local authorities. Miss Crandall, refusing to submit, was arrested, tried and con victed in the lower courts, whose verdict, however, was reversed on a technicality by the court of appeals in July 1834. Thereupon the local opposition to her redoubled, and she was finally in Sept. 1834 forced to close her school. She married the Rev. Calvin Philleo. She died at Elk Falls, Kan., on Jan. 28, 189o.
See J. C. Kimball's Connecticut Canterbury Tale (Hartford, Conn., 1889) and S. J. May's Recollections of Our Anti-Slavery Conflict (Boston, 1869) .