Schooling the Nation

The Success of the Canterbury Academy for Black Women

Author: Jennifer Rycenga and Kazimiera Kozlowski Series: Women, Gender, and Sexuality in American History

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Founded in 1833 by white teacher Prudence Crandell, 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.

Critic Reviews

“Jennifer Rycenga’s book is a brilliant work of scholarship that positions the Black and Brown young women of the Canterbury Female Boarding School as leaders in their own fight for education and early civil rights. Dr. Rycenga has accomplished what few scholars have done: to use history as a roadmap for today to seek justice in education and continue the work of Maria Davis, Sarah Harris, and Prudence Crandall. Dr. Rycenga’s research has changed the way this story is told.”--Joan M. DiMartino, Museum Curator and Site Superintendent, Prudence Crandall Museum “Original and enlightening. Delving deeply, Rycenga explores Crandall’s life and influences while revealing the students who attended the Academy as members of a remarkable group.”--Julie Winch, author of A Gentleman of Color: The Life of James Forten

About the Author

Jennifer Rycenga is a professor emerita of comparative religious studies and humanities at San JosÉ State University. She is the coeditor of Frontline Feminisms: Women, War, and Resistance.