The school began well. It had students. It had the backing of the abolitionist network. It had the endorsement and participation of the Crafts themselves, whose story was known and whose credibility was, at the start, substantial.
What it had against it was the structure of the post-Reconstruction South. White supremacist violence was organizing. Cotton prices were falling. The political energy that had briefly made Black advancement in the South possible was being systematically dismantled through legislation, intimidation, and the quiet erosion of federal support.
Night riders — the kind of organized racist violence that would be more formally institutionalized as the Ku Klux Klan — attacked properties associated with Black education and uplift. The Georgia Encyclopedia’s account and other sources indicate that violence and legal oppression made the school’s operation progressively harder.
In 1876, things came apart in a different direction. Some of William’s financial backers accused him of misusing charitable funds. The accusation was serious enough that William sued for libel in Boston — in the city where the abolitionist community that had sheltered them in 1850 was concentrated. He lost the case in 1878. The loss cost him his relationships with many of the allies who had supported him for decades.
The school closed for lack of funding. The Crafts lost the farm in the mid-1880s, undermined by a combination of falling cotton prices and the accumulated weight of the controversy and its aftermath.
## The Last Years
By 1890, Ellen and William Craft had returned to being dependent on family rather than on the organizations and networks that had sustained their work. They moved to Charleston, South Carolina, to live with their daughter’s family.