Jennifer Rycenga recovers a pioneering example of antiracism and Black-white cooperation. 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.

Zoom webinar registration link: https://bit.ly/42Nm6N5

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.

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.

More about her book here: https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/?id=p088377
More about her bio here: https://www.sjsu.edu/people/jennifer.rycenga/

Mondays at Beinecke online talks focus on materials from the collections and include an opening presentation at 4pm followed by conversation and Q & A beginning about 4:30pm until 5pm. Episodes are generally recorded and published on the library’s YouTube channel within a few weeks of original live program.