abolitionists – Ingliando

On this day, the maximum security federal penitentiary on Alcatraz Island, also known simply as Alcatraz, first opened its gates to 137 prisoners from the United States Penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kansas. Within a year, the prison had a population of almost 250 prisoners, most of whom were notorious gangsters, bank robbers, counterfeiters, or murderers. The prison was conceived as a last resort prison, designed to hold the worst of the worst who had no hope of rehabilitation, and reports of brutality and inhumane conditions have been registered by a number of former prisoners. The prison’s high security and the island’s location in the cold waters and strong currents of San Francisco Bay, gave Alcatraz the reputation of being escape-proof and America’s most secure prison. Among the prison’s most infamous inmates were Al Capone, Machine Gun Kelly, Robert Stroud, Alvin Karpis and many others. The prison was finally closed on 23rd march 1963.

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On this day in the town of Canaan in New Hampshire, white segregationists put an end to the first racially integrated school in America, the Noyes Academy. The Academy was founded by New England men sympathetic to the abolitionist movement, including Samuel Noyes, and on its opening admitted 28 white and 14 black students including several future prominent African-American abolitionists. Local residents, stirred up by segregationists, voted to remove the school as a ‘public nuisance‘. The removal consisted in seventy-five members of Canaan and neighbouring towns, together with nearly a hundred yoked oxen, literally pulling the school off its foundations and dragging it to a nearby swamp. They then attacked the home of George Kimball, where several of the students were at the time boarding and eventually forced both the black students and the black teachers to flee from Canaan.