Before Dred and Harriet Scott took their case to the Supreme Court in the 1850s, hundreds of similarly situated enslaved African Americans sued for their freedom in St. Louis. Many won.
Those suits, known as freedom suits, and the slaves and lawyers who waged them will be commemorated with a new memorial on the Gateway Mall on the east side of the Civil Courts Building, the 22nd Judicial Circuit of Missouri announced. Based in the City of St. Louis, the judicial circuit is the heir to this unique legal and social history and has formed a steering committee to oversee the memorial’s installation.
The committee has issued a request for proposals from artists who could create the memorial. The request calls for a design that “will memorialize the courage of both the oppressed, disenfranchised and enslaved litigants and their trial lawyers in working for their freedom.” The depiction may be literal or abstract.
Once completed, the memorial will look eastward toward the Old Courthouse, where many of the freedom suits were tried.
The St. Louis Bar Foundation will raise funds to finance the design and installation of the memorial, budgeted for $200,000. The City of St. Louis will assume ownership of the completed memorial.
Interested artists must submit their proposals to the steering committee by November 9, 2015. Any artist in the United States is eligible to submit a proposal.
Asked to explain why the steering committee’s request for proposals places as much emphasis on the lawyers who tried the suits as the slaves who sought their freedom, the circuit’s public information officer explained that litigating the cases required courage on the part of the attorneys, too. Abolition was far from a popular cause with all of the region’s lawyers or the general population.
Additionally, the attorneys litigated the suits out of principle, not for compensation. The slaves lacked resources of their own to pay for legal services. The request for proposals calls the attorneys “early exemplars of pro bono public service by the trial bar.”
Still, slaves that lost their suits risked far worse consequences, including the possibility of being sold downriver to the harsher conditions of the Deep South.
And they did not have the benefit of a jury of their peers. At the time, juries consisted solely of white males. The jurors could have been slave-owners themselves.
Even so, Missouri law provided some hope under its “once free, always free” standard. Until the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dred and Harriet Scott decision, Missouri law “provided that if a slave was taken into a free state for a period long enough for the slave owner to have residency, then the slave was automatically free and remained so when returned to Missouri,” according to the request.
“Given the risk faced by the courageous slaves who went [to] court and the heroic lawyers representing these slaves in the face of difficult odds, it is appropriate that the City of St. Louis should have a fitting monument to honor these trial lawyers and their clients who contributed so directly to the movement against slavery.”
The memorial is scheduled to be completed by October 2016.
Copies of the RFP are available from Thom Gross, public information officer for the 22nd Judicial Circuit. Requests may be emailed to tgross@courts.mo.gov. The RFP also may be downloaded from www.stlcitycircuitcourt.com/News_Blog. Proposals are due by Nov. 9.
Kevin Flannery is a St. Louis American editorial intern from Washington University School of Law.
