Sarah Harris Fayerweather was an African-American activist, abolitionist, and school integrationist.
Background
Fayerweather was born Sarah Ann Major Harris on April 16, 1812 in Norwich, Connecticut. The daughter of William Monteflora Harris and Sally Prentice Harris, both of whom were free farmers, Fayerweather was of African and French West Indian descent and the second eldest of twelve children.
Education
Beginning in January 1833 at the age of twenty, she attended Prudence Crandall"s Canterbury Female Boarding School in Canterbury, Connecticut, considered to be the first integrated schoolhouse in the United States.
Career
In September 1832, Fayerweather requested admission to the Canterbury Female Boarding School. In a letter to William Lloyd Garrison’s newspaper The Liberator, Crandall recalls Fayerweather’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, ‘Mission 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. 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.
Fayerweather continued to attend the school in the face of harassment and ostracization until Crandall, afraid for her pupils’ safety after a mob converged on the school in September of 1834, closed the school permanently.
Family She was buried in the Old Fernwood Cemetery in Kingston, Rhode Island.