The Floating Freedom School

Thank you, Lee Patterson, for sharing about and therefore introducing me to 

"The Floating Freedom School" and Rev. John Berry Meachum, 

And thank you, Wikipedia, for helping me create this post. 

Rev John Berry Meachum

Rev John Berry Meachum (1789–1854) was an American pastor, businessman, educator and founder of the First African Baptist Church in St. Louis, the oldest black church west of the Mississippi River. At a time when it was illegal in the city to teach people of color to read and write, Meachum operated a school in the church's basement. Meachum also circumvented a Missouri state law banning education for black people by creating the Floating Freedom School on a steamboat on the Mississippi River.

As a young man, he guided 75 enslaved people from Kentucky to their freedom in Indiana, a free state. Once established in Missouri, he and his wife Mary Meachum were conductors on the Underground Railroad. They also purchased enslaved people and took them into their home until they earned enough money to repay their purchase price. The Meachums employed the enslaved people that they purchased and emancipated them when they had saved enough to repay their purchase price. In the meantime, they were also educated and learned skills to be self-sufficient once freed. John and Mary also helped runaway enslaved people across the Mississippi and into Illinois along the Underground Railroad. The Mary Meachum Freedom Crossing in St. Louis, the first site in Missouri to be accepted in the National Park Service's National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom, was named after Mary.

Photo via @urbantoons

Floating Freedom School

The Floating Freedom School was an educational facility for free and enslaved African Americans on a steamboat on the Mississippi River. It was established in 1847 by the Baptist minister John Berry Meachum. After Meachum's death in 1854, the Freedom School was taken over by Reverend John R. Anderson, a former student, and closed sometime after 1860.

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 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. One of the early students was James Milton Turner, who would go on to establish 30 new schools for African Americans in Missouri after the Civil War. Another was John R. Anderson, who received much of his reading and religious training from the school. Reverend Anderson later took over management of the school after Meachum's death in 1854. School attendance dropped off just before the Civil War, with only 155 black children enrolled in 1860.