Prudence Crandall, well-known Quaker schoolteacher, was in fact not a Quaker in 1833, when she transformed her female academy into an academy for black women. Crandall, despite being raised and educated in the Society of Friends, had converted to the Baptists and undergone full immersion in east ern Connecticut's Quinebaug River three years earlier. This easily verifiable fact has escaped most accounts of her school, past and present. This particular instance typifies a larger recurring pattern of personal religious transformation in the lives of many early women abolitionists, both black and white, and illus trates one of the many ways in which these changes have been marginalized and dismissed. In a similar vein, the dramatic history of Crandall's school has often been sentimentalized, reduced to an icon of a white woman teaching black girls to read. 1 This ignores the fact that her students were teenagers and i Crandall was the head teacher of an academy for young women in Canterbury, Connecti cut, starting in late 1831. In the fall of 1832, Sarah Harris, a young black resident of the village, asked to attend the school. For a few tense months, the school existed in this integrated state, with the par ents and officials of Canterbury becoming increasingly agitated over what they perceived as an ill advised social experiment. When they started to withdraw their daughters, Crandall decided to change the nature of her school and instruct black women only. Despite incensed attempts by town leaders to prevent it, Crandall's black students started arriving in April 1833. They came from all over the eastern seaboard, mainly from large cities. Up to twenty-one black women and girls partic ipated in Crandall's school until it was closed, because of recurring vigilante violence, in September 1834. There had also been legal efforts to suppress Crandall's school; three trials produced indeci sive results, because of the constitutional issues raised. The bravery of the scholars and their teacher during the sixteen months they had together is quite remarkable. At least five of the students are