To overlook African American girls and women as educational activists in early America is to ignore their insights and perspectives, especially concerning race and gender. Fully aware that education was far from a panacea, African American women insisted nonetheless on its centrality for black achievement, opportunity, and civil rights. They, along with their allies, wished to blaze a path for themselves and the next generation.34 Chronicling their struggles, In Pursuit of Knowledge addresses an essential human question: What does it mean to live a purposeful life? To seek learning and to grow, some African American women might respond. But would they be welcomed into the classroom, or would they be debarred? Would they be harassed by adversaries, or could they learn in peace? These purposeful young women never knew what awaited them. But they went forward anyway.
1 / Prayer and Protest at the Canterbury Female Seminary
On a walk around the village green of Canterbury, nineteen-year-old Sarah Harris (Figure 1.2) might have spied the large, two-story, Federal-style building that housed the Canterbury Female Boarding School. She and her family had recently moved to the area. Her father, William Montflora Harris, born in the West Indies, emigrated to the United States, likely during the Haitian Revolution. He settled in Norwich, Connecticut; married Sally Prentice, who was of Mohegan and European descent; and raised eleven children.1 In January 1832 he purchased a farm in Canterbury, which dates the family’s arrival at that village. About seventy free blacks resided in Canterbury in 1830, constituting less than 4 percent of the village’s population.
Sarah and her siblings likely received their early education at Sunday schools.2 They may have gone to the public primary schools in Canterbury too, which, like some other small towns and villages in Connecticut, allowed African American and white children to attend together. In urban areas such as Hartford, however, public primary schools were racially segregated. In any case, a boarding school was different. Operated by Prudence Crandall, a white Quaker woman, the Canterbury Female Boarding School enrolled twenty young, middle-class and elite white women from the Windham County area. The Board of Visitors, an eight-member, all-white, all-male board consisting of lawyers and politicians, praised Prudence’s teaching.3 The young female students enjoyed their experiences; years later, two former students reminisced about “the many pleasant moons we have spent together under the chesnut [sic] tree studying our definitions.”4 While these young women studied English grammar, natural and moral philosophy, and music and drawing, among other subjects, Sarah labored as a servant in the house of her white neighbor Jedediah Shepherd.5
But in September 1832, only eight months after arriving in Canterbury, an ambitious Sarah asked for admission to Prudence Crandall’s all-white school. Her goal, she explained, was to get “a little more learning, enough to teach colored children.”6 What inspired Sarah to reject servitude and push for advanced study? We cannot know for sure, but possibly a recent lecture had inspired her. That same month, Maria W. Stewart, an African American lecturer, delivered a speech about servitude at Franklin Hall in Boston, which was later printed in the Liberator, an antislavery newspaper edited by the white abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. Stewart asserted that African Americans “ha[d] dragged out a miserable existence of servitude from the cradle to the grave.”7 Perhaps her words resonated with Sarah, a servant herself, and also a reader of the Liberator. Sarah’s father and her brother, Charles, both circulated the newspaper, and Sarah once described it as a “welcome visiter [sic]” in her home.8 Sarah’s rather modest personal goal—to acquire enough learning “to teach colored children”—thus suggests not simply a personal ambition but also a communal mission to see free blacks move beyond a position of servitude.
Prudence weighed Sarah’s request carefully.9 She suspected some of her white students might bristle at the idea of attending classes with a young African American woman, but Sarah’s earnestness prevailed. “If I was injured on her account I would bear it,” Prudence resolved, and she agreed to admit Sarah.10 And bear it she did, for Sarah’s admission completely unsettled the village of Canterbury. The parents of the white students held a meeting with Prudence and demanded that she dismiss “the nigger girl.”11 When they threatened to withdraw their daughters, Prudence pushed back, reopening the school in April 1833 exclusively for African American girls and women. Now the school’s stated purpose was to train young African American women as teachers.12
FIGURE 1.1. Sarah Harris (1812–1878) was the first African American student to desegregate the Canterbury Female Boarding School in Connecticut in 1832. The controversy surrounding her admission led to the establishment of the Canterbury Female Seminary for African American girls and women in April 1833. Sarah later married George Fayerweather and settled in Kingston, Rhode Island. Courtesy of the Prudence Crandall Museum. Canterbury, CT.
This reconstituted female seminary faced bitter opposition from white residents such as Andrew T. Judson, a Connecticut state attorney and politician who fervently supported the American Colonization Society, an organization founded in 1816 to resettle African Americans in Liberia. Hence the very idea of educating young African American women instead of young white women—not to mention devoting an entire school to the task in the United States—conflicted with Judson’s colonizationist views. Opposition from white residents intensified over a seventeen-month period, with verbal threats, legal action, and finally violence, which led to the school’s abrupt closure in September 1834.13
How did African American girls and women individually and collectively contest this escalation of white opposition and racism in Canterbury? Writings from several students at the seminary published in the antislavery press provide a glimpse into their thoughts and actions. These writings, consisting of speeches and letters, cite scripture, praise God, and highlight the power of Christian love. Canterbury’s African American students evoked and implemented an ethic of Christian love, which included biblical principles to “love God” and “love thy neighbor.” This ethic was neither meek nor militant but rather, I argue, an act of social protest. Just as historians have analyzed moral suasion and other ideologies as foundational tactics in antebellum social movements, so too must we recuperate African American women’s self-developed ethic of Christian love.14
Perhaps most remarkable is that these young women espoused an ethic of Christian love amid the looming threat of violence. Instead of citing biblical passages from Exodus, commonly referenced by African American ministers, these women turned to the Gospel of Mark, the Letter to the Romans, and the Book of John—scriptures emphasizing love that enabled them to argue for inclusion and belonging. Time was of the essence since they wanted to remain at Prudence’s school. These students bound their communal project of learning with an appeal to the minds and hearts of the white