Senate President Pro Tempore Don Williams, Prudence Crandall scholar, IS history

Twenty two years is more than enough time in the General Assembly, so the Blogster is never startled when a veteran says he’s going to reclaim an actual life somewhere. Don Williams has been unique, leading the Senate over the last 10 years following the long-lingering tenure, then-oh-so-sudden departure of John Rowland back in 2004. Rowland quit that July 1 on his way to federal prison, launching Lt. Gov. Jodi Rell into the governor’s office and in the chain reaction, then-Senate President Pro Tempore Kevin B. Sullivan to the fourth-floor office of the lieutenant governor and Williams to the Senate presidency. Now 56, Williams announced today he won’t seek another term. The Capitol was abuzz today with the usual media surgeons laying out the anatomy of his career.

But the Blogster, for the moment, wants to remember Williams for what he’s done for us lately. A week ago, on March 19, he joined in a little commemoration of Prudence Crandall, the state heroine, whose school for young African American girls opened in Canterbury in 1833. The second annual remembrance was held before a couple dozen people in a corner of the Capitol’s first floor.

 

But what Williams said, off-the-cuff, during a 15-minute speech was one of the best monologues you could hear. There was only a handful of reporters present for Williams’ recollection of how Connecticut’s rulings against blacks in the case that spelled doom for  Prudence Crandall’s school 1834 set the scene for the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision unholding slavery and, ultimately, set up the Civil War.  In 1886 the Legislature voted to give her an annual pension of $400. The General Assembly voted in 1995 to name her the state heroine.

Williams, with six years of research on Crandall, has written a book about her that will be published by Wesleyan in June. Ultimately, in the 1953 case of Brown v. Topeka, Kansas, Board of Education, the Supreme Court accepted the 1834 argument made by Crandall’s lawyer.

Williams portrayed the state trial as a put-up job stacked against Crandall and the state Supreme Court was essentially a rubber stamp a year later, since the state court judge who heard the initial case was elevated to the Supremes in time to rule on his own lower-court decision.

“It came out years later that four out of the five Supreme Court justices wanted to rule that the black law was unconstitutional and that black Americans were US citizens entitled to all the rights and privileges of American citizens,” Williams said, in a recording I am glad I kept. “But because Judge David Daggett (of New Haven) ruled on the court decision below – also believe it or not sat as a Supreme Court justice on the appeal of his own case, a conflict that we would not permit today – because he was there deliberating among them they couldn’t bring themselves to overrule their colleague. And in that moment of weakness and cowardice on their part they instead more or less invented a technicality. So they reversed the conviction but they did not rule on the merits. And because of the frustration that caused, in part because of that frustration, townspeople gathered in September of 1834, at midnight, broke all the windows in the front of the house and created such panic inside the school that Prudence Crandall decided she could not go on further.”

By 1954’s Brown v. Bd of Education case, Crandall’s case was being used to support the 14th amendment, equal rights under the law.  “When that case was re-argued the NAACP attorneys…they went through all sorts of court records and history and what did they find?” A historical thesis that the genesis of equal rights arguments went back to Prudence Crandall. “Thurgood Marshall and the other attorneys for the NAACP incorporated the arguments of Prudence Crandall’s attorneys in their brief for the second argument to the Supreme Court on whether the 14th amendment would allow that court to strike down the 14th amendment. And when the court ruled in 1954 and Chief Justice Earl Warren issued his opinion from the bench, he said that we cannot turn the clock back to the 1800s. The 14th amendment requires that we strike down segregation. They incorporated the argument of the NAACP….It was 120 years after the closure of Prudence Crandall’s school that the Supreme Court upheld what she had tried to do in 1833, to educate both black students and white students in the same classroom. It took us that long, but it was because of her work and her legacy,” Williams said. “She had a part and played a role in that part of history that has changed all our lives. It’s a legacy that moved equality and justice in the United States forward; lessons we can learn today.”

The Blogster hopes Williams sells some books after he secures big funding for expansion of the state’s pre-Kindergarten programs.