Frederick Douglass dismissed Myrtilla's plan to open a school for African American girls in the slaveholding South as "reckless, almost to the point of madness." But Myrtilla Miner, the daughter of poor white farmers in Madison County, New York, was relentless. Fueled by an unyielding feminist conviction, and against a tide of hostility, on December 3, 1851, the fiery educator and abolitionist opened the School for Colored Girls-the only school in...