Sarah Harris Fayerweather

Sarah Harris Fayerweather (April 16, 1812 – November 16, 1878) was an African-American activist, abolitionist, and school integrationist.

In a letter to William Lloyd Garrison's newspaper The Liberator, Crandall recalls Sarah's visit: "A colored girl of respectability – a professor of religion – and daughter of honorable parents, called on me sometime during the month of September last, and said in a very earnest manner, 'Miss Crandall, I want to get a little more learning, enough if possible to teach colored children, and if you will admit me into your school I shall forever be under the greatest obligation to you.

'"[4] After brief deliberation, Crandall admitted her to the school and refused to expel her when the parents of most of the other attendees withdrew their daughters.

[1] Faced with severe opposition from the Canterbury community, Crandall closed the existing school – only to reopen in 1833 in order to teach a group of solely African-American students.

[5] Both Fayerweather and her husband supported abolitionism and racial equality; Fayerweather joined the Kingston Anti-Slavery Society, attended antislavery meetings held by the American Anti-Slavery Society in various cities across the North, maintained a correspondence with her former teacher Prudence Crandall and former slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass, and subscribed to The Liberator until Garrison ceased publishing it in 1865.