The Forbidden Schoolhouse: The Dramatic Story of Prudence Crandall and her Students

The Forbidden Schoolhouse: The Dramatic Story of Prudence Crandall and her Students. By Suzanne Jurmain. 160 pages. Tr. $19.00 ISBN 978-0618473021

Summary: In 1831, Prudence Crandall opened the Canterbury Female Boarding School. Located in Canterbury, Connecticut, the school was rated as one of the leading private girls’ academies in New England. Though owning a slave was still legal in Connecticut, most African-American people were free. Racial discrimination was rife, however. Prudence Crandall grew up in a Quaker family, and she sympathized with the plight of the slaves. Reading William Lloyd Garrison’s abolitionist paper the Liberator opened her eyes to the unequal treatment experienced by Northern blacks, who received less pay than whites for the same work, and were forbidden from entering most schools. Crandall was so moved by what she read, that she accepted an African American girl named Sarah Hayes as a student, in 1832. When word got around to students’ parents that their daughters were attending school with a black girl, chaos ensued. The floodgates were opened as parents lashed out at Crandall, removing their girls from her academy. This is the story of Crandall’s decision to transform her academy into a school for African American girls. We follow Prudence Crandall as she welcomes pupils from across New England, and sympathize with her as she courageously bears the local outcry against the school, and battles state laws.

Standard(s): 8.7 Compare the lives of and opportunities for free blacks in the North with those of free blacks in the South; 4.Compare the lives of and opportunities for free blacks in the North with those of free blacks in the South. 8.9 Students analyze the early and steady attempts to abolish slavery and to realize the ideals of the Declaration of Independence. 1. Describe the leaders of the movement (e.g., John Quincy Adams and his proposed constitutional amendment, John Brown and the armed resistance, Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad, Benjamin Franklin, Theodore Weld, William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass). 6. Describe the lives of free blacks and the laws that limited their freedom and economic opportunities.

Suggested Age Range: 10-14 years

Annotation: The Forbidden Schoolhouse chronicles nineteenth-century ideas of women, race and education, offering tweens with balanced and engaging first-person narratives. We follow Prudence Crandall’s Canterbury Female Boarding School, from its founding in 1831 as an all-white school for girls to its closing in 1835 as a school for African American girls. The local outcry against the school brought forth many short-term laws. The 1833 Connecticut Black Law, for example, fined out-of-state African-American students for attending Connecticut schools. Charged with breaking the Black Law, Prudence’s court struggles were met with failure. However, her lawyer’s rhetoric played a fundamental role in the 1955 landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown vs. Board of Education. Separate education for whites and blacks is unconstitutional, for it violates student’s rights as American citizens.

Subjects/Themes: Crandall, Prudence, 1803-1890 – Biography; Women educators – Connecticut; African-American women – Education – Connecticut

Awards: ALA Notable Books for Children (2006)

            NCTE Orbis Pictus Award Nominee (2006)

            Golden Kite Award Nominee (2005)

            James Madison Book Award Nominee (2006)

            Rhode Island Children’s Book Award Nominee (2007)

Reviews: School Library Journal (November 1, 2005)

            Booklist (October 1, 2005)

High Interest Annotation: Local and state-wide protests against a nineteenth-century academy for African American girls, the Canterbury Female Boarding School, is chronicled.