As a young civil rights attorney for the local NAACP, Frankie Freeman carefully monitored the integration of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas.
It took the elite Screaming Eagles of the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne Division, under orders from President Dwight D. Eisenhower, to get nine black children into the formerly all-white school. They were the first in the South to test Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision outlawing school segregation.
After a tumultuous year, the NAACP decided that the “Little Rock Nine” needed to attend summer school, but there would be no troops to protect them. They needed to leave their racially charged city.
Freeman was asked to provide a “safe house” for three of the nine. She took two girls, both about the same age as her daughter, into her home and found another St. Louis family for a boy.
“We had to keep them safe,” Freeman said.
Few people in St. Louis were aware that three of the children at the apex of the nascent Civil Rights Movement were attending Hadley Technical High School during the summer of 1958, the same summer that Freeman’s 11-year-old son died of pneumonia.
By the time members of the “Little Rock Nine” arrived at her door, Freeman had won a landmark case that ended legal discrimination in public housing in St. Louis and was well on her way to becoming one of the most important attorneys of the civil rights era and beyond.
Freeman, who overcame two bouts of cancer in earlier years, passed Friday, January 12 at age 101 .
“The nation has lost one of its greatest crusaders for racial and sexual justice,” said Bill Clay, former Missouri congressman.
Her remains will lie in repose in the Grand Hall of the Missouri History Museum 5-8 p.m. Friday, January 19. The public is invited to the viewing.
At 9:30 a.m. Saturday, January 20, her funeral services will be open to the public at Washington Tabernacle Missionary Baptist Church, 3200 Washington Blvd., where Freeman was a long-time member. Interment will follow at Calvary Cemetery, 5239 West Florissant Ave..
Separate and unequal
“I knew I was going to become a lawyer and get involved in civil rights cases,” Freeman told the St. Louis Beacon in 2009.
Freeman passed the Missouri Bar in 1948. Her first civil rights case came along the following year.
She teamed up with three NAACP attorneys and sued the St. Louis Board of Education on behalf of three brothers who wanted to take airplane mechanic courses offered only at the white technical high school. She won and won again on appeal to the Missouri Supreme Court. So the school board eliminated the course.
“It was a learning experience to see how far people would go to maintain racial segregation, and how short-sighted they were in undervaluing people on the basis of race,” she wrote in her 2003 memoir, “A Song of Faith and Hope.”
A few years later, she was the NAACP’s lead attorney in a groundbreaking suit against the St. Louis Housing Authority. The case ended legal racial segregation in low-rent public housing. She was aided by Constance Baker Motley, a future federal judge, and future U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall.
The Housing Authority hired its former adversary as in-house counsel. Fourteen years later, she was fired.
Ironically, her demise came, in part, because of her role with the powerful U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, which investigated voter discrimination and recommended corrective federal policies.
In 1964, she was the first woman appointed to the commission, a move begun by President John F. Kennedy and completed by President Lyndon B. Johnson following Kennedy’s assassination.
Problems arose when the commission turned its sights on McDonnell Douglas for alleged equal opportunity violations on a multi-billion-dollar contract. The U.S. Air Force put the contract on hold temporarily and the old St. Louis Globe-Democrat editorial page cried foul.
Freeman defended the commission’s work; the Housing Authority’s board promptly dismissed her.
“I was considered a trouble-maker by McDonnell Douglas and the Globe-Democrat,” she wrote.
Her unemployment was short-lived. KMOX Radio mogul Bob Hyland called and put her to work part-time as a community consultant with the station.
She was a commission member for 16 years, in the service of four presidents: Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter. She also continued to try civil rights cases. She filed suit in 1978 against Southern Illinois University Edwardsville on behalf of a black dental student who called his time at the school “psychological hell.”
During this period, she won another suit against the St. Louis Board of Education, this time for gender discrimination. A middle-school principal was denied a job as a high school principal because those jobs, she was told, were reserved for men. The board settled before the case could go to trial.
President Carter later appointed Freeman as an inspector general in the Community Services Administration. It was a brief tenure. President Ronald Reagan dismissed all 15 inspectors general shortly after his inauguration in 1981.
At 65, when most people retire, for Freeman it was full-steam ahead. She took jobs briefly with the City of Wellston and the University of Missouri-St. Louis before returning to private practice with Montgomery Hollie & Associates. After more than six decades practicing law she retired, more or less, in 2008.
Black, woman, lawyer
When Freeman headed to New York after receiving her Bachelor’s Degree in Mathematics from Hampton University, she planned to attend law school at St. John’s University. The school, however, did not recognize credits from black colleges.
Nevertheless, she remained in Harlem with her aunt and took bookkeeping courses while she figured out what to do next. She joined Abyssinian Baptist Church, pastored by the Rev. Adam Clayton Powell Jr., a renowned U.S. senator from Harlem. She met a young man from St. Louis at her church named Shelby Freeman. He was a student at Columbia Teacher’s College. They were married on December 15, 1938.
When her husband got a job in Washington, D.C., she got a job as a clerk with the Department of the Treasury. She entered Howard University Law School in 1944. With two children, she graduated in 1947, on time and number two in her class.
Thurgood Marshall, then counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, offered her a job in Baltimore, but the Freemans were preparing to move to her husband’s hometown. They arrived here in 1948.
Freeman was ready to practice criminal law, but no law firm, not even black ones, wanted a woman trial lawyer.
She went into private practice, opening an office on the second floor of the Jefferson Bank Building. When she was introduced to judges in the civil and criminal courts, she let it be known that she was willing to take some pro bono cases to get exposure.
After two grueling years of criminal law, she switched to civil cases. Her first prospective client walked out when he realized that “Frankie” Freeman was not a man.
“Some people – even some black people – were also not interested in having a black lawyer,” she recalled in her memoir.
When asked if she’d been discriminated against more because of her race or her gender, she’d answer, “I don’t know, but I have scar tissue from both.”
Over time, Freeman became politically active in Democratic politics. She became interested in running for the Missouri House of Representatives, but she lacked the backing of one of St. Louis’s most powerful black politicians at the time, Jordan “Pops” Chambers. He later changed his mind, but so did she. She did not nurse a grudge.
Freeman experienced first-hand the discrimination she dismantled as an attorney.
She was refused service in a coffee shop during a layover in Louisville, Kentucky on her way to her mother’s funeral in Danville, Virginia. When she refused to leave, the police were called. When no arrest was made, the waitress closed the restaurant.
En route to the Missouri Bootheel by Greyhound bus in 1961, Freeman attempted to enter the ladies’ room at a rest stop in Flat River. A white customer blocked the door marked “Ladies” saying, “Colored can’t come in here.”
She called upon her own civil rights attorneys who filed complaints on her behalf. Both facilities were desegregated within weeks.
Freeman’s family said she inherited her fearlessness from her namesake, her grandfather, Frank Muse, a well-to-do businessman and tobacco farmer with a decidedly different demeanor than his friend, Booker T. Washington.
When Klansmen came onto his property, the oft-told story was that he shot the horses out from under them and told the men to get the dead horses off his land.
Citizen of the Year
Freeman’s sense of justice was matched by her altruism, driven in part by the memory of her son, who died of pneumonia at age 11.
“Butch is one of the reasons I have always done whatever I can for children,” she said.
Freeman was a charter board member of the Herbert Hoover Boys’ and Girls’ Club and the Urban League of Metropolitan St. Louis, serving on the steering committee of the Youth Development Fund. She chaired the scholarship fund at her church, Washington Tabernacle Missionary Baptist.
In 1999, Freeman and Dr. William Danforth, chancellor emeritus of Washington University, co-chaired a task force set up by the federal courts to oversee the St. Louis school desegregation program.
The duo teamed up again in 2006 on behalf of St. Louis Public School children. They waded into controversial waters, with their committee recommending the state takeover of the beleaguered schools. Their work led to the creation of a Special Administrative Board to run the system. Her board service at other local non-profit institutions was extensive.
She followed in the footsteps of her friend, civil rights activist Dorothy Height, becoming the 14th national president of Delta Sigma Theta sorority. She fondly recalled a particular soror who helped her prepare for President Kennedy’s inaugural ball.
She humbly accepted a trove of awards, among them the NAACP’s highest honor, the Spingarn Medal; induction into the National Bar Association’s Hall of Fame in 1990; and 2011 Citizen of the Year, elected by the business leaders who had previously received the award.
“I’ve filed suit against some of those folks over the years,” she told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
Black bourgeoisie
Marie Frankie Muse was born November 24, 1916, in Danville, Virginia, the last capital of the Confederacy. She was the eldest of the eight children of William Brown Muse, a railroad postal clerk, and Maude Beatrice Smith Muse, who taught school briefly before getting married.
She was the great-granddaughter of slaves. She grew up knowing that in Virginia, there were white Muse families and black Muse families, all related.
Her parents, both college-educated, provided the blueprint for her racial consciousness.
They insisted their children walk, sometime miles, rather than ride segregated streetcars. She was steeped in African-American history and exposed to preeminent blacks, like Marian Anderson, who were forced by segregation to stay with black families while traveling.
Freeman grew up in a nine-room house with indoor plumbing and a telephone. She recited the poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar and the Gettysburg address at Calvary Baptist Church. All of the Muse children played musical instruments; she played piano and would often fill in for the church organist throughout her life.
Her family was considered members of the “black bourgeoisie,” but prosperity did not insulate them for racist insults.
After graduating from high school at 16, she enrolled in her mother’s alma mater, Hampton Institute. All of the Muse children went to college.
An early feminist, Mrs. Freeman stuck with some traditions: She cooked for her family and kept her faith. “There were times I’d tell the Lord, ‘Help me get through this day,'” she told the Beacon.
Freeman was preceded in death by her parents; her husband, who died in 1991; her son, Shelby “Butch” Freeman III; and two sisters, Virginia Muse, who died in infancy, and Maudena Muse.
Her survivors include her daughter, Shelbe Patricia Bullock of Broomfield, N.J.; siblings William B. “Bill” Muse Jr., Charles Sumner “Tweed” Muse, Edward B. Muse, Allie Muse Peeples and Andy “A.C.” Muse; four grandchildren: Marcel Ellis Freeman Bullock, Terrance Patrick Bullock, Darren Shelby Bullock and Nicole Yvette Fordson; four great grandchildren; and a host of nieces, nephews and cousins.
The family has requested in lieu of flowers that donations should be made in the name of Attorney Frankie Muse Freeman, c/o Washington Tabernacle Nance Scholarship fund, 3200 Washington Avenue, St. Louis, MO 63103 or Howard University, 2400 Sixth Street, NW Washington, D.C. 20059.
