High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Prudence Crandall (September 3, 1803 - January 28, 1890), a schoolteacher raised as a Quaker, stirred controversy with her education of African-American girls in Canterbury, Connecticut. Her private school, opened in the fall of 1831, was boycotted when she admitted a 17-year-old African-American female student in the autumn of 1833; resulting in what is widely regarded as the first integrated classroom in the United States.