In 1863, several hundred thousand slaves fled the South to seek protection with Union troops. Since there was no organized set-up to feed or shelter these refugees, northern philanthropists stepped into the breach. Supported by the New England Freedman’s Aid Society, the American Missionary Association, the National Freedman’s Relief Association, and many other organizations, hundreds of well-meaning men and women followed Union armies into the South to bring material and spiritual aid to freed slaves. “These emissaries of Yankee culture—most of them women,“ wrote James McPherson in Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era“—saw themselves a peaceful army come to elevate the freedman and help them accomplish the transition from slavery to prosperous freedom.”
    The Yankee states, including Connecticut, still had their share of prejudice. You only have to look at the problems in Canterbury in 1833, when schoolteacher Prudence Crandall was forced to close her school for welcoming a young black woman into her classroom.
    Prejudice seems thick and ever-present, but in Connecticut the light of brotherhood seems to shine through, somehow.  In 1965 at Norwalk High School, I had an English teacher, Isabel Colby, who made real this higher vision of humanity. There was another English teacher, Frances Ramer. Her husband was also a teacher at Norwalk High. Years later, after both of them died, I found out that they had joined their estates into a fund that promotes community service in Norwalk every year.

                                                                                                                Max H. Peters
                                                                                                                Publisher and Editor