Schooling the nation: The Success of the Canterbury Academy for Black Women
Publication Date
1-7-2025
Document Type
Book
Publication Title
University of Illinois Press
Abstract
Founded in 1833 by white teacher Prudence Crandall, Canterbury Academy educated more than two dozen Black women during its eighteen-month existence. Racism in eastern Connecticut forced the teen students to walk a gauntlet of taunts, threats, and legal action to pursue their studies, but the school of higher learning flourished until a vigilante attack destroyed the Academy. Jennifer Rycenga recovers a pioneering example of antiracism and Black-white cooperation. At once an inspirational and cautionary tale, Canterbury Academy succeeded thanks to far-reaching networks, alliances, and activism that placed it within Black, women’s, and abolitionist history. Rycenga focuses on the people like Sarah Harris, the Academy’s first Black student; Maria Davis, Crandall’s Black housekeeper and her early connection to the embryonic abolitionist movement; and Crandall herself. Telling their stories, she highlights the agency of Black and white women within the currents, and as a force changing those currents, in nineteenth-century America.
Insightful and provocative, Schooling the Nation tells the forgotten story of remarkable women and a collaboration across racial and gender lines.
Funding Sponsor
Howard D. and Marjorie I. Brooks Fund for Progressive Thought
Keywords
African American Studies, Education, History Am.: 19th C., Women & Gender Studies
Department
Humanities
Recommended Citation
Jennifer Rycenga. "Schooling the nation: The Success of the Canterbury Academy for Black Women" University of Illinois Press (2025).
