Mississippi River

In 1847, John Berry Meachum was forced to close the school he had been operating in a St. Louis church basement. Earlier that year, the Missouri legislature had passed a law that made it illegal to provide "the instruction of negroes or mulattoes, in reading or writing". Meachum and one of his teachers were arrested by the sheriff and threatened.

To circumvent the new state law in Missouri, Reverend Meachum bought a steamboat which he anchored in the middle of the Mississippi River, thus placing it under the authority of the federal government. The new floating "Freedom School" was outfitted with desks, chairs, and a library. Students were ferried back and forth between St. Louis and the Freedom School in small skiffs. The school eventually attracted news reporters and teachers from the East. Hundreds of black children were educated at the Freedom School in the 1840s and 1850s. Those who could pay were charged one dollar a month.

Mary Meachum (1801-1869)

May 21, 1855 - after an attempt to ferry nine enslaved people across the Mississippi River to freedom in Illinois, Meachum and a freedman named Isaac were arrested for breaking the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850.

May 24, 1854 - she was charged in court with slave theft, while charges against Isaac were dropped.

July 19, 1855 - The Missouri Republican reported that Mary was tried by a jury and acquitted of at least one charge, and the remaining charges were dropped.

One scholar says Meachum was sold into slavery in Vicksburg, Mississippi, after her arrest.

December 17, 1864 - Daily Missouri Democrat reported that Meachum was president of the Colored Ladies Soldiers' Aid Society in St. Louis.

Because blacks were not allowed to ride streetcars at that time, the women negotiated with the streetcar company to ride the streetcar one day a week, on Saturdays, to the segregated wing of the Benton Barracks Hospital of St. Louis, where wounded black soldiers were hospitalized. There, the women read to the soldiers, comforted them, and taught them to read.

The white nurse in charge of the hospital, Emily Parsons, wrote of her outrage that the women were limited to only one day a week and described them as "intelligent colored women, ladies in fact, many of them well educated and wealthy."

Meachum died in St. Louis in August 1869. She is buried in Bellefontaine Cemetery.

John Berry Meachum ​​(1789-1854)

John Berry Meachum, founding pastor of the 500+ member, African Baptist Church in St. Louis, purchased and freed 20 black slaves who were non-family members in the 1840s and 1850s.

He and his wife facilitated the Underground Railroad through their home and their church. He built a school upon his steamship, which he moored in the middle of the federally-owned Mississippi River for black children to be educated. One of his skiffs ferried these students to and from school each day (education being illegal in Missouri after an 1847 statute was passed).
Among his students was James Milton Turner, founder of black public schools in Missouri after the Civil War. One such school in Meachum Park, Missouri, was named in his honor, "J. Milton Turner Elementary School". [LarrysLibrary.Blogspot.com]

John lived until February 19, 1854