Wilfrid Lupano and Stéphane Fert’s Surrounded: America’s First School for Black Girls, 1832, is an artfully fictionalized graphic history based on the true story of a groundbreaking educator and a courageous class of Black girls 30 years before the Civil War. In 1832, the year after Nat Turner’s bloody slave rebellion, Prudence Crandall, a white headmistress of a boarding school for girls in Canterbury, Conn., admits Sarah Harris, a Black girl. Crandall recruits more “young ladies of color,” and opposition from white townspeople escalates into disturbing acts of violence and terrorism against the school. The book includes a biographical essay on Crandall, Harris, and her Black classmates. In this 10-page excerpt, a Black boy recites grisly details from The Confessions of Nat Turner, and readers are introduced to the antebellum world of Sarah and Prudence. Surrounded: America’s First School for Black Girls, 1832 by Wilfrid Lupano and Stéphane Fert will be published by NBM in February.