Freeman Bosley, Jr. recalled the dramatic demographic shift in the neighborhood and streets, Grand and Palm Ave., where he was raised. His parents, Freeman R. Bosley Sr. and his wife, Marjorie Ellen Robertson Bosley, bought a house there in 1964.
Bosley Sr., one of the city’s longest-serving aldermen and father of the city’s first Black mayor, passed away at the age of 90 on May 16, 2025.
He was born in 1934, in St. Louis, one of eight children of Alma J. Bosley and Preston T. Bosley, a chief railway mail clerk for the Missouri Pacific Railroad.
Reflecting on his father’s legacy took the son back to the neighborhood where he planted political roots that spread throughout the family and is still bearing fruit today.
They moved on to Palm and Grand about 15 years after the 1949 race riot at the nearby Fairgrounds Park’s newly integrated public swimming pool.
It was also 15 years after the passage of the Federal Housing Act that dedicated federal funds for new highways and affordable housing in the city and suburbs in the region. Bosley’s neighborhood was in transition with many middle-class whites throughout the city beating hasty paths to the majority white suburbs.
“The population and schools were still about 60% white when we moved in and white people held all the (political) offices,” Bosley Jr. recalled. “But then came ‘white flight’ and by 1972, the neighborhood was damn near 70% Black.”
His father joined a group of Blacks in the neighborhood seeking elected positions. By 1974, he eventually ran and was elected Committeeman of the 3rd Ward. Three years later, Bosley, Sr. was elected to the Board of Aldermen.
By most accounts, he was a controversial but effective force to be reckoned with.
“He was an eloquent orator whose voice was always on behalf of the people who are never heard,” recalled Mike Jones, who was an alderman and has served in senior policy positions in city and county government.
“He was easily our James Brown, the hardest working man in politics.”
Crime and neighborhood infrastructure were avid causes for Bosley. As alderman he pushed legislation to penalize thieves who stole bricks from abandoned buildings. He proposed public caning of young graffiti artists who he felt didn’t receive adequate discipline in their homes.
Bosley worked to prohibit the sale and distribution of tobacco products to children while advocating for the removal of tobacco billboards from schools and parks. He also wrestled to rid public places like City Hall of cigarette smokers.
“If you need to smoke, you can go the hell outside,” he publicly declared after introducing a bill to ban smoking in all areas of buildings owned or leased by the city.
In 1997, Bosley called for the firing of police officers who severely beat Gregory Bell, a mentally challenged young man, after he accidentally triggered an alarm in his house.
“If Freeman gave you his word, you could take that to the bank,” said former city assessor and comptroller, Virvus Jones, who served with Bosley Sr. when he was elected alderman in 1981
“He was devoted to trying to improve the quality of life for all the people of North St. Louis and especially in the third ward.”
In 1985, Bosley Sr. challenged then Mayor Vincent Schoemehl Jr. but suffered a hard defeat in that year’s primary. His son, Freeman, who was elected mayor in 1993, considers his father’s loss a trial run for his successful campaign.
“I think he ran to see what kind of support a Bosley could get,” he said. “He told me, ‘My campaign will show my kids how it can be done.’”
Groomed for politics since his father ran for committeeman, the younger Bosley had been knocking on doors and campaigning with his father since he was 16 years old.
“My father helped make me a man and a politician. He taught me that if you’re thinking about running for something, you get out there and visit people,” Bosley said, detailing how his father showed him how to network with committeemen, organizational leaders and voters. “And he wouldn’t do it for me; he made me do it because he knew it didn’t matter how much money you raised; you had to get the people on your side.”
The father, who diligently worked on his son’s mayoral campaign, was ecstatic when Freeman Jr. was elected mayor in 1993.
The younger Bosley’s mother, Marjorie, passed away in 2009. He and his sister, Pamela Bosley Byes were the only children of the elder Bosley’s union. Bosley Sr. fathered four other children, LaKeySha, Brandon, Aloha Mischeaux and Kenya Young-Bosley.
Brandon succeeded his father as alderman of the 3rd Ward but lost the seat in 2023 in what the redistricted 14th Ward to Alderman Rasheen Aldridge is now. LaKeySha Bosley was elected to the Missouri House of Representatives in 2018 and is serving her fourth term in office.
Mike Jones, a former St. Louis alderman and County Executive senior advisor, said Bosley Sr. was “always there” for North St. Louis
“Freeman always represented the public interest of the people, never the private interests of the privileged,” Jones stated.
“There have been many before him, and there have been many after him…but there has never been, and probably never will be, one quite like him!”
Sylvester Brown Jr. is the Deaconess Foundation Community Advocacy Fellow.