In Memphis, they’ve turned the hotel where Martin Luther King was murdered into a museum honoring the Civil Rights Movement. Across the South, “Civil Rights tourism” is on the rise. Though not without ambiguities and controversy, this development at its best may represent an attempt to acknowledge the sins of the past, the courage of those who resisted evil, and the pernicious effects of racism on everyone.

St. Louis, as I discussed in an Occasional Planet piece a few months ago, has a foggy memory of its role in slavery, Jim Crow, and other forms of systemic racism. But sometimes we do try.

The other day I came across this in my Facebook news feed.

“St. Louis Freedom Suits in the Era of Henry Shaw” with Dr. Kenneth Winn, Librarian of the Missouri Supreme Court. Part of the Friends of Tower Grove Park Lecture series. FREE Today, 4/1 at Stupp Center, 3P.

I knew I had to go.

Dr. Kenneth Winn, former archivist for the State of Missouri, got a grant to archive St. Louis circuit court records. Combing through jumbled documents, each tri-folded, tied with a red ribbon, and covered with a fine layer of black dust from the original coal-fired heating system in the Old Courthouse, Winn gradually realized that he and his team were finding something remarkable. Between 1824 and 1845, scores of enslaved people sued in the St. Louis court, arguing that they should be free. Winn’s archivists have found more than three hundred such lawsuits over the past eight years.

Though freedom suits were also frequent in other border states like Kentucky and Maryland, as well as in Louisiana, the St. Louis collection of freedom suits is now the largest in the United States. St. Louis, it seems, is ground zero for important court cases in the African American freedom struggle. Consider Shelley v. Kraemer and Jones v. Mayer, groundbreaking cases that addressed restrictive covenants and racial discrimination in private real estate deals; or United States v. The City of Black Jack, another important decision against housing practices that had a discriminatory effect. All three of these cases originated in the St. Louis area.

In these nineteenth-century freedom suits, however, the issues were even more stark and personal: individuals bringing suit against slave masters, asserting that they were unfairly enslaved. Their arguments typically took one of three approaches:

1) A claim of maternal Indian descent: Native Americans at this time were not legally subject to enslavement (though in practice many were), and one’s legal status depended the legal status of one’s mother.

2) A claim of established residence in a free state or territory: This was the claim made by Dred and Harriet Scott, who had lived in free states for extended periods of time with their master, a military surgeon.

3) A claim that one (or one’s parent) had been a victim of kidnapping: Stealing people was a lucrative source of illicit income at this time. Such was the case with St. Louisan Lucy Delaney, whose 1891 narrative From the Darkness Cometh the Light is still read today as a remarkably detailed and accurate account of the author’s journey from slavery to freedom.

 Why St. Louis? 

At Tower Grove Park that Sunday afternoon, Winn explained that St. Louis attracted a lot of slave freedom suits because as a city that bordered a free state, it offered both a supportive community of free blacks as well as the chance of gaining the support of sympathetic whites.

Also, in 1824, shortly after Missouri’s controversial entry into the Union as a slave state, the state legislature amended its slave codes to allow slaves to sue for their freedom. In a remarkable move, the new codes also provided for taxpayer-funded legal counsel for slaves who brought these suits. Merely providing the right to sue was fairly meaningless, after all, since few slaves had the resources to mount successful legal cases.

Despite this remarkably liberal policy, slavery was entrenched in St. Louis. The city was founded in 1764 by Pierre Laclede and his stepson Auguste Chouteau, along with their slaves. When Auguste died, he owned some fifty slaves, ranging from elderly men to newborn babies. Auguste and his brother Pierre were ruthless slave masters who tried to disrupt the transfer of the Louisiana Territory to U.S. control because they feared that Thomas Jefferson would forbid slavery in the newly-acquired lands. Later, Pierre Chouteau, Jr., known as “Cadet,” would help to make sure that Missouri’s constitution permitted slavery—and later still he would help to fund the Sanford family’s legal work in Dred Scott v. Sanford. Though today the Chouteaus’ name carries the ring of St. Louis royalty, they were actually something like the Koch brothers: wealthy power brokers who worked behind the scenes to extend oppressive laws and promote inequality.

Dr. Winn presented a fascinating account of the way freedom suits worked on the ground. More women than men filed these suits; men were more apt to take to their feet to escape slavery, while women often had children to think about. If a slave sued for freedom, the master was forbidden to sell the slave away or beat him or her in retaliation. If the slave feared that such retribution was going to occur regardless of the law, he or she would be removed to the city jail and possibly hired out to someone else. The wages paid would be held until after the case was settled. If the slave won freedom, the money was given to the newly emancipated winner. If not, the money went to the slave master, who would often then sell the slave away as revenge.

Some of the lawyers who represented slaves were scorned in the same way that some lawyers today are considered “ambulance chasers”—seen as sucking public funds to defend a despised class of people. On the other hand, some very prominent attorneys took on these freedom suits, not because they believed slavery was wrong, but because they believed it was right—but only if done legally. Edward Bates, for instance, a slave-owner who later became Lincoln’s attorney general, was Lucy Delaney’s attorney and made an impassioned argument on her behalf.

In 1845, the “Golden Age of Freedom Suits” in St. Louis came to an end when the flow of public funding for them was abruptly shut off. Dred and Harriet Scott’s case, filed shortly before the cessation of this funding, was seemingly a routine case, for they clearly had established residence in a free state.

The Scotts lost on a technicality in the St. Louis circuit court, but as their case was appealed to the Missouri Supreme Court, according to Dr. Winn, a lot of white people decided to throw a lot of money into making it a test case to bring down the “once free, always free” rule. Indeed, the state court explicitly broke with precedent, declaring that revolutionary times demanded a new approach. “Once free, always free” was no more: it didn’t matter where the Scotts had resided.

With powerful people like the Chouteaus arrayed against Dred and Harriet Scott, the case made its way to the Supreme Court, and in 1857 Chief Justice Roger Taney authored the devastating majority opinion that African Americans had no rights a white man was bound to respect and that, in fact, the Missouri Compromise of 1820 was unconstitutional. Congress, attempting to legislate a compromise to the issue of slavery, had exceeded its powers, the Court decided. (This decision sounds eerily familiar today as the Supreme Court considers the fate of the Affordable Care Act.)

The last freedom suit in St. Louis was filed in 1860, and in five years’ time such suits would be moot.

How should a city reckon with its past?

Surely Dr. Winn’s talk—and the research it was based on—represents one way of doing so. The story he told was complex, as was the picture of St. Louis that emerged. Here was a place whose very founder and his descendents were major forces in the perpetuation of chattel slavery. Yet it was also a place that offered a relatively hospitable climate for enslaved people who risked everything to seek justice and freedom through the law. It was a place where a slave-owning lawyer could make an impassioned speech in order to free a brave African American girl who had been illegally enslaved.

In order to reckon with our complex past, we St. Louisans need to hear these types of stories and to share them with each other. In our classrooms, Black History Month needs to be a time of searching for new understandings. We may know about the March on Washington or the bridge at Selma, but how much do we know about all the important struggles that took place in our own city? If we don’t understand the complex history of race in St. Louis, do we have any hope of understanding the complex present?

The post When slaves sued for freedom: A city reckons with its past appeared first on Occasional Planet.

The other day I took a bike ride along the Riverfront Trail in St. Louis.  The trail runs north from Laclede’s Landing, following the Mississippi until it crosses over the river at the Old Chain of Rocks Bridge. Winding through flood walls, junkyards, at least one homeless encampment, and other industrial sites, the trail offers a cross section of a part of the city that the average pedestrian or motorist never sees.

Near the Merchant’s Bridge, I was surprised to discover an historical site called the Mary Meachum Freedom Crossing. Across from a corrugated metal building, a mural on a white concrete wall depicts several dark figures—escaping slaves—boarding a canoe on the moonlit Mississippi. In the other corner of the painting, menacing figures train rifles on them.

I teach a high school course on African American history and literature, so I took note of the mural (and snapped a picture of it as well), planning on mentioning it to my students that Monday. I biked to within eyesight of the bridge then turned around to head back to the trailhead. On my return, I noticed a plaque near the memorial. Although I almost sped by it in my rush to get home (I was late), I turned back and took the time to read it.

The marker explained that on the morning of May 21, 1855, a group of runaway slaves, guided by a free black woman named Mary Meachum, crossed the Mississippi River at that spot near the Merchant’s Bridge.  On the Illinois side, they encountered a policeman and other authorities. Shots were fired. Some escaped. One member of the group was killed. Mary Meachum, the widow of prominent black clergyman John Barry Meachum, was arrested and jailed, and identified in the press as a participant in the Underground Railroad.

All of this was fascinating, but what struck me with particular force was a detail in the middle of the text on the marker. Some of the slaves involved in the incident belonged to “the prominent St. Louisan Henry Shaw.”

In this day and age in America, no doubt as a result of the labors of activists and historians of the African American experience, most reasonably enlightened people have considered the paradoxes of our national ideals and heroes: that Thomas Jefferson, for example, who wrote that line in the Declaration of Independence about all men being created equal, owned slaves (and fathered children by them). One of George Washington’s slaves actually fled from Washington’s estate during Washington’s time as our first President.

Nevertheless, the revelation that Henry Shaw owned slaves struck me with surprising force. It hit close to home. I live on the periphery of Shaw’s garden (which opened four years after the incident commemorated at the Freedom Crossing). I coach my daughters’ soccer practices in Tower Grove Park, which Shaw bequeathed to the city of St. Louis in 1868. On a couple of occasions I’ve toured Shaw’s house. I’ve held my daughters up to the windows of the mausoleum where Shaw is buried. For a while, my oldest daughter even used Shaw as a kind of yard stick for how old people and things are. “Was Henry Shaw alive then?” she would ask. In my mind, Shaw had always been a kindly, philanthropic environmentalist—not a slavemaster.

When I got home from my bike ride, I poked around on the Internet and read more about the Mary Meachum Freedom Crossing site in a fine St. Louis Magazine article by Jeannette Cooperman. Cooperman’s account added an even more disturbing twist to the story, one that further tainted my sense of the man who is the namesake for a street, a neighborhood, and even a coffee shop near my house. As punishment for the escape, Shaw authorized a slave trader to sell one of the escapees, Esther, down the river to hard labor. He did not sell her two children, however.

As Angela Da Silva points out in Cooperman’s article, St. Louisans tend not to think of Missouri as part of the South. We’re the Midwest, we say. A Border State. We conveniently forget about the fact that the Border States were slave states, specifically exempted from the Emancipation Proclamation during the Civil War so as not to jeopardize their tenuous allegiance to the Union.

But hearing this shocking story about Henry Shaw is an unforgettable reminder that Missouri is actually the Upper South. The streets we walk were walked by slaves and slaveowners. I live on grounds that were once tended by slaves. One of our city’s most famous benefactors owned slaves and cruelly enforced their subjection.

“I wonder where the slaves lived?” my wife wondered when I told her the story. I thought of Henry Shaw’s house and the basement windows into which my daughters and I have curiously peered. Those basement rooms were for the “servants,” I think I remember hearing during a tour. Was servant just a euphemism for slave?

The story of Mary Meachum, of Henry Shaw and his slaves, offers a rather chilling lesson in historical memory. It speaks of the ways we deceive ourselves about our past, allowing ugly realities and episodes to fade and be replaced by comforting misconceptions.

In the Missouri Botanical Garden today, less than a mile from Henry Shaw’s country home, is a garden dedicated to the life and work of George Washington Carver. This stately memorial pays tribute to the botanical contributions of a famous African American scientist. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, yet the Carver Garden also seems a distinctly contemporary example of political correctness that avoids the discomfiting questions raised by a memorial like the Mary Meachum Freedom Crossing.

The Freedom Crossing site, in the end, testifies not only to the moral failings of the venerable Henry Shaw, but also to the courage and commitment of black St. Louisans. It’s a shame that it’s virtually hidden from public view.

That hiddenness itself carries a message.

The post Evil and the garden appeared first on Occasional Planet.