Chapter V: Those Chained Behind Us

By noon of June 27, 1833, Sam had completed a singular morning's work for a clergyman in an upcountry Connecticut parish. He had visited the county jail, picked a cell recently vacated by a murderer who left for the gallows, persuaded the jailer to clean it up, and had a bed brought over from the May house to replace the cell's dirty cot.(1)

Now he was finished and waiting for Miss Prudence Crandall of nearby Canterbury to arrive in custody of the sheriff. The cell was for her. Miss Crandall was not accustomed to such escort or such lodgings. An educated young Quaker spinster of elegance and determination, Miss Crandall was in trouble up to her pretty neck; she had managed to outrage the decencies of her village and particularly those of her wealthy neighbors. Welcomed originally to Canterbury by those very neighbors, she had opened a school, in her home and accepted their daughters as students. Then, however, she had allowed a young Negro girl to come, too. The citizens were appalled and their daughters hastily withdrawn. The resolute Miss Crandall, unintimidated, advertised for Negro students and they had come flocking from New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and Providence.

To the villagers, Miss Crandall's 20 young ladies had looked like a black tide. Her neighbors had taken violent reprisal, refusing to sell her food, dumping filth in her well, and attempting to arrest her students as vagrants. Though the village of Canterbury was six miles away from May's Brooklyn, he had thrown himself into this new educational crisis the moment he first heard about it on February 27, 1833. Aroused by the story of Canterbury's indignation, Sam had hurried off to see Miss Crandall and offer help. With him went a Brooklyn parishioner, one George Benson. A good man to have along on such a mission, Benson was equipped with the proper sentiments, considerable money, and the prospect of William Lloyd Garrison as a son-in-law.(2)

A composed Miss Crandall welcomed the two men, but she soon showed her gratitude and relief at their appearance. As a woman, she could not with propriety state her own case in public, yet she was faced with the prospect of a town meeting called specifically to "abate the nuisance" of the Negro school.(3) No male had offered to defend her. She was willing to move the school to a less conspicuous part of the township, she told May, and asked him to appear as her attorney in the meeting to come. The citizens might be mollified by an adroitly offered compromise.

The town meeting March 9 in the major Canterbury meeting house, however, wound up in chaos. All attempts at order perished in the wild harangues of a leading Connecticut politician, Andrew T. Judson, who was particularly offended by the Negro school, He lived next door to Miss Crandall. Judson dominated the meeting, and then demanded and got immediate adjournment. May and another spokesman for Miss Crandall, Arnold Buffum of the New England Antislavery Society, were put out of the meetinghouse. They lingered on the green and persuaded some of the townspeople to listen to Miss Crandall's offer, but all hopes of compromise had vanished. Judson promptly mustered enough support in the Connecticut state legislature to pass a new "Black law" requiring approval by local authorities of any school for out-of-state Negroes. Miss Crandall was arrested on a charge of violating this new law on June 27.

Sam was undaunted by news of her indictment. With a rapidly developing flair for the dramatic, he sensed great possibilities in actually jailing Miss Crandall for the crime of having "proffered the blessing of a good education to those who, in our country, need it most. . . ."(4) He refused to put up bail, selected the murderer's cell as most appropriate for Miss Crandall' new role, and now on the afternoon of the 27th awaited his martyr-in-the-making.

Almost at sundown they met in front of the jail with the sheriff loudly protesting what he had to do. The drama was played out to a full gallery of citizens, horrified, inert, or enraged.

I would be a "______ shame and an eternal disgrace to the State,"(5) cried one, to put a lady into a murderer's cell. This was just the reaction May had planned on.

"Certainly gentlemen," said May, "and you may prevent it if you please."

He drew a torrent of abuse. The citizens avowed they wanted no more"_____ _____niggers" coming among them. May and his friends had encouraged all this. It was mean and despicable of them to desert Miss Crandall now.

"She knows we have not deserted her," said May. "The law which her persecutors have persuaded our legislature to enact is an infamous one . . . but the people generally will not so soon realize how bad . . . unless we suffer her persecutors to inflict on her all the penalties it prescribes. If you see fit to keep her from imprisonment in the cell of a murderer, you may do so . . . ; we shall not,"

May's antagonists turned away cursing. The sheriff, still protesting, turned Miss Crandall over to the jailer. The bolts of her cell were thrown behind her. She had, May felt, entered into history.

He was right. Miss Crandall's incarceration lasted only over night. Next morning May bailed her out, and after two trials her case was eventually set aside by Connecticut's Court of Errors on a technicality.(6) Rising violence in Canterbury, however, did what the law would not. Prudence Crandall, terrified at last out of her composure by vigilante assaults that left her windows in shards and the house in flames, closed the school in September, 1833. May felt "ashamed of my color. Thus ended the generous, disinterested, philanthropic, Christian enterprise of Prudence Crandall."(7)

But its effects were only beginning. Reverberations echoed throughout the nation, bringing fame to the persistent Quakeress and to her ardent young "attorney" as well. May found himself a growing power in reform circles and increasingly known throughout New England at large.(8) Yankees began to stir uneasily, troubled in conscience. The denial of education to Negroes was proving not only unfair but dangerous, as rising crime among the ignorant Blacks seemed to show.(9) The cause of Negro education drew new importance and new adherents.

May's reputation among these campaigners went before him. Samuel Gridley Howe, chairman of the Boston School Committee, wanted Sam in 1845 as new principal of the notorious Smith School for Negro children in Boston. An unprecedented examination by representatives of the Boston School Committee had demonstrated the "deplorable condition" of this segregated institution.(10) The incumbent principle had "little faith in the capacities of the Negro children themselves," reported the committee.

May turned down the proffered post(11), but the offer was a tribute to his faith in the native capacities of the Negro. May believed that the Black was not mentally inferior to the white, only made to seem so by lesser education and opportunities. May first expressed this conviction formally in a series of published letters to Andrew T. Judson, his antagonist in the Crandall matter. May could, he told Judson, cite the reports of "physiologists" to show that Africans are not "naturally inferior" to other races. And even if such inferiority did exist, May argues, would it not provide more reason for giving Negroes particular assistance rather than crushing their talent and aspirations when they did appear?(12)

For those who argued that integration in education would mean intermarriage after school days were over, May had a frank reply. "Of course we do not believe there are any barriers established by God between the two races," he told Judson. "If there were any, the complexions of tens of thousands in our land show to our disgrace that those barriers are not impassable." He was careful to deny any advocacy of mixed marriage, but he maintained, "such connections would be incomparably more honorable to the whites . . . and the virtue of our nation, than that illicit intercourse which is now so common especially at the south."(13)

Despite such single choices urging integration, the northern states increasingly sought the answer to the problem of Negro education in the establishment of separate schools for the free Blacks. Through the Thirties and Forties the north found in such schools the solution to the problem of the increasing number of Negroes who managed to settle in northern communities despite increasingly stringent laws designed to keep them out. Cincinnati passed measures to expel all out-of-state Negroes who could not give guarantee of good behavior. Free Blacks were forbidden to come into Indiana and Illinois; it was a penal offense for any white person to help them come.(14) Still the number of free Blacks grew. Northerners were beginning to fear them almost as much as southerners dreaded the prospect of slave revolt; any attempt to admit northern Blacks into white schools almost inevitably met defeat. The primary school committee of Boston, that citadel of reform, voted it "inexpedient" in 1848 to act on a petition for abolition of separate Negro schools.(15) Most other communities followed suit.

This growing movement toward segregated education roused May to his most eloquent and indeed historic statement on desegregation in the schools.

"The institution of separate schools for the children of those who are 'guilty of a skin not colored like our own' is a perpetual imputation of fault, unworthiness, or inferiority, which must tend to discourage and keep them depressed," May wrote in 1864.(16) The argument was closely paralleled 90 years later in the "separate therefore unequal" decision of Chief Justice Earl Warren and his colleagues on the United States Supreme Court as they declared segregation unconstitutional.(17)

Give the Negroes an equal chance in the race for improvement, May urged, and "then if we get ahead and keep ahead of them, we may plume ourselves on our superiority. But it is no honor to us to beat those who are chained behind us, or encumbered with clogs. I am ashamed when I hear a white person assert the inferiority of Blacks."

"We are to show the world," he wrote, "that all men, not white men alone, but all, of every complexion, language, and lineage have equal rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and that all men . . . are capable of governing themselves . . . ."

* * *

Down through the years May thus wrote and fought and argued and agitated. When he could grab the reins of political power, he acted. In 1848 as pastor of the First Unitarian Society of Syracuse, New York, May was entrusted by his fellow citizens with the responsibility of drawing up the statement of principle on which the community's new school system was founded. Syracuse, a comparatively late settlement on the Erie Canal, had grown past its village proportions and had incorporated as a city.(18)

"Resolved," wrote May, "That in the bestowment of blessings of education, none of the children about us may be omitted with safety to the community any more than to themselves; for it is not in human wisdom to foresee by what individuals the public welfare may hereafter be most seriously affected."(19)

May's resolutions won approval; Negroes entered the new school system equally with whites. For a struggling village-turning-city, the decision was historic. Thanks to Samuel J. May, the city of Syracuse never segregated its schools; as late as 1860 the Syracuse Daily Journal could state that Syracuse still had the only completely integrated city school system in the state of New York.(20) (New York City, for one, still maintained separate schools for Negroes and whites in 1878.)(21)

Having engineered this heady triumph in 1848, May kept his hand in the integration battle for the next 20 years. He commuted from New York to his native Massachusetts to join the battles resulting in the antidiscrimination statute for the public schools enacted by the Bay State legislature in 1855.(22) He served on the board of trustees of the New York Central College in McGrawville, New York,(23) a unique little institution that flourished for a time in the Fifties on Gerrit Smith's money,(24) admitting Negroes, women, teetotalers, students too poor to pay their own way, and others generally outside the academic pale. It was the first college in the United States with a Negro faculty member.(25)

At the end of May's life a magnificent new opportunity for Negro education appeared with the end of slavery and the opening, at least temporarily, of the south to northern educators and their ideals. May leaped into this exciting new crusade as the Civil War neared its end. His old skills at organizing and money raising and agitating were effective as ever; the old appeals to the good of the nation were just as applicable now. Lame and aging though he might be at 71, he trumpeted repeated calls in 1868 in behalf of schools for the new southern freedmen and their children. "The education of these new constituents of our body politic is now a matter of paramount importance," he cried, echoing all the appeals he had made for the welfare of the democracy down through the years. "The well-being of the nation depends on it."(26)

As always, his fellow citizens responded to the deft May touch and the irresistible May appeal. Hundreds of dollars poured into the coffers of the Syracuse Freedman's Aid Society which could by 1868 plan to send four teachers to South Carolina instead of the two it had formerly maintained.(27) Here was an opportunity to take education to the Black man at the time and place he needed it most.

Almost a century later, May's battle for Negro education would still be underway. But during his lifetime he sighted the enemy, advanced to the first skirmishes, and took the high philosophical ground to be held by liberal thinkers and fighters for the next hundred years.

Footnotes

(1) A famous story in Connecticut annals, the case of Prudence Crandall has been duly chronicled in almost every history of the state and in many other memoirs, journals, and special accounts. Best narratives in giving May's role are May's own account in his Some Recollections Of Our Antislavery Conflict (Boston: Fields, Osgood, & Co., 1869), pp. 39-72; Mumford, May Memoir, pp. 148-152, and Samuel J. May's The Right of Colored People to Education Vindicated: Letters to Andrew T. Judson, Esq. and Others in Canterbury . . . (Brooklyn: Advertiser Press, 1833). An excellent secondary source is Hazel Wolf's On Freedom's Altar—The Martyr Complex in the Abolition Movement (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1952), pp. 51-54. The above account is drawn from these sources except where otherwise indicated.

(2) May was "among the first to be deeply influenced by Garrison." he heard Garrison's first Boston lecture in 1830, had been greatly impressed and had adopted the Garrisonian doctrine of immediate emancipation as his own. Louis Ruchames, The Abolitionists (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1963), p. 17. May married Garrison to Helen Benson in 1834. Merrill, Against Wind and Tide, p. 94.

(3) Bayles, History of Windham County, p. 502.

(4) May, Antislavery Conflict, p. 56.

(5) The direct quotations are all from May, Antislavery Conflict, pp. 56-57.

(6) Bayles, History of Windham County, p. 504. The money for Miss Crandall's defense and for publication of a newspaper giving her side of the story came providentially from Arthur Tappan, wealthy New York merchant who came all the way to Brooklyn to press on May all the money needed for trials and appeals. May, Antislavery Conflict, pp. 57-62.

(7) May, Antislavery Conflict, p. 71.

(8) This evaluation of May's new stature comes from a manuscript biography of May, "God's Chore Boy," by Freeman Galpin, Syracuse University Archives.

(9) Shepard, Pedlar's Progress, p. 272.

(10) The report of the inspecting committee is found in the Common School Journal, VII (October 1, 1845), pp. 299, 300. For an account of Howe and the school committee see Harold Schwartz, Samuel Gridley Howe, Social Reformer 1801-1876 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1956), pp. 128-135.

(11) Supra, p. 37.

(12) May, Letters to Andrew T. Judson, p.21.

(13) Ibid., pp. 23-4.

(14) Early Lee Fox, The American Colonization Society, 1817-1840 (The Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science; Baltimore: The John Hopkins Press, 1919), XXXVII, p. 33.

(15) Religious Recorder, June 25, 1864.

(16) May to Andrew D. White, March 11, 1864, White Papers, Cornell University.

(17) Brown et. al. v. Board of Education of Topeka et. al., 347 U. S. 483 ( May 17, 1954). The parallel between May's views and those of the 1954 Supreme Court decision was first noted by James M. Smith in "The 'Separate But Equal' Doctrine: An Abolitionist Discusses Racial Segregation and Educational Policy During the Civil War," Journal of Negro History, XLI (April, 1956), pp. 138-147.

(18) For a further discussion of Syracuse, see below, Chapter VIII. The city of Syracuse was incorporated by act of the New York State Legislature on December 14, 1847. The act of incorporation was found defective in its provisions for schools. A special act providing organization of a city school system in Syracuse was passed by the legislature, April 11, 1848. May's resolutions giving philosophical basis for the system were approved at public meetings of citizens February 10 and February 28, 1848. Edward Smith, A History of the Schools of Syracuse (Syracuse: C. W. Bardeen, 1893), pp. 42-3.

(19) Onondaga Standard, February 16, 1848.

(20) Syracuse Daily Journal, August 1, 1860.

(21) Syracuse Courier, May 22, 1878.

(22) Statutes of Massachusetts, 1855, Ch. 256, sec. 1, as cited in Smith, "The 'Separate But Equal' Doctrine," p. 138.

(23) May to Andrew D. White, March 11, 1864, White Papers.

(24) Ralph Volney Harlow, Gerrit Smith, Philanthropist and Reformer (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1939), pp. 231-232.

(25) First and Second Annual Reports of the New York Central College Association Held At the College Buildings, McGrawville, July 4, 1849 and 1850). (Utica: Roberts and Sherman, 1850), 8-16.

(26) Syracuse Daily Journal, August 15, 1868.

(27) Syracuse Daily Journal, December 10, 1868.