“One has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.” –Martin Luther King, Jr.
Learning Objective:
In the Floating Freedom School lesson plan, students will learn about the fascinating story of John Berry Meachum and his wife Mary who circumvented a Missouri law that outlawed the education of Black people, free and enslaved, in 1847 by setting up a Steamboat classroom in the Mississippi River just outside the state’s jurisdiction. Compare this tactic to the Civil Rights Movement’s strategy of civil disobedience.
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“If the machine of government is of such as nature that it requires you to be of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law.” –Henry David Thoreau
Common Core Standards
Common Core Standards:
- CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.SL.6.1 – Engage effectively in a range of collaborative discussions (one-on-one, in groups, and teacherled) with diverse partners on grade 6 topics, texts, and issues, building on others’ ideas and expressing their own clearly.
- CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.SL.6.3 – Delineate a speaker’s argument and specific claims, distinguishing claims that are supported by reasons and evidence from claims that are not.
- CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.SL.9-10.1 – Initiate and participate effectively in a range of collaborative discussions (one-on-one, in groups, and teacher-led) with diverse partners on grades 9–10 topics, texts, and issues, building on others’ ideas and expressing their own clearly and persuasively.
- CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.SL.9-10.3 – Evaluate a speaker’s point of view, reasoning, and use of evidence and rhetoric, identifying any fallacious reasoning or exaggerated or distorted evidence.
- CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.SL.9-10.4 – Present information, findings, and supporting evidence clearly, concisely, and logically such that listeners can follow the line of reasoning and the organization, development, substance, and style are appropriate to purpose, audience, and task.
Beginning Task:
- Ask your students what it takes to make big societal changes. Give an example: if they wanted to abolish homework, what would they have to do? Would this change happen easily? Would it happen quickly? What steps might students take to institute a new rule like the example? Can an individual make a difference?
- Explain that throughout history, there have been times when people felt so deeply about a political or social issue, they resisted the status quo in some manner. Some of these strategies were effective, some were not.
- Tell your students that you will be examining diverse ways people have behaved to bring about big societal changes.
Middle Task:
Teach your students about the Meachums’ Floating Freedom School. Discuss his method for circumventing the law. Then discuss the Civil Rights Movement’s acts of civil disobedience like sit-ins and the Freedom Rides. Use the article below.
Activity:
Divide the classroom equally into two. Have students debate which method is likely to work. Discuss how long they think each strategy would take to impact the change the individuals participating are hoping to achieve. Students should explain the pros and cons of each strategy.
Floating Freedom School and Civil Disobedience Article:
John Berry Meachum was born enslaved on May 3, 1789, in Goochland County, Virginia. His owner Paul Meachum moved from city to city several times, before finally settling in Kentucky. Meachum learned several trades, including carpentry. By the time he was 21 years old, he had earned enough money to purchase his freedom and the freedom of his father. John’s wife Mary Meachum was born into slavery in Kentucky in 1801. When she was 14 years old, her enslaver relocated to St. Louis and Mary was forced to leave behind her husband behind. John followed Mary to St. Louis and purchased her freedom shortly thereafter. The two settled in the city in 1815.
Not all slaves during this period could work for wages or purchase their freedom. In Missouri, one of only two southern states that did not criminalize manumission or the act of buying one’s freedom, the free black population experienced a dramatic increase. Between 1820 and 1850, the ranks of liberated Blacks rose from 347 free Blacks in 1820 to 2,618 free Blacks in 1850. Historian Ira Berlin‘s classic study of freedmen notes that “. . . while rural Missourians rarely freed their slaves, a growing number of St. Louis masters liberated their bondsmen or allowed them to buy their freedom.”
Meachum and his wife Mary helped other enslaved people gain their freedom. Through profits from his businesses, he owned two riverboats and operated a barrel-making factory, the couple purchased and freed enslaved individuals. He provided on-the-job training in skills like carpentry that could advance their station in life once free. Meachum and his wife purchased the freedom of around 20 slaves between 1826 and 1836. Almost every person that the Meachum’s freed paid them back, which provided the money to help free others. The Meachums were actively involved with the Underground Railroad and used their own home as a safe house to assist people seeking freedom.
In St. Louis, the Meachums became involved in Christian education for slave children through John Mason Peck’s school. During the years of 1818-1822, whites and blacks worshipped together under Peck’s leadership. As the number of Black Baptists grew, the church leaders decided that Black congregants would now have their own, separate meetings. John Berry Meachum was formally ordained in 1825 and led the newly formed congregation. That year, Meachum and other members of the Black Baptist community established the First African Baptist Church of St. Louis. At the time, the congregation numbered around 220 members, including some 200 slaves. They built the new house of worship at Third and Almond Streets in 1827, which is still in existence today under a new name, First Baptist Church.
John Berry Meachum wrote “An address to all the colored citizens of the United States” in 1846 encouraging the education and enlightenment of the Black community to raise their station. But Missourians who initially supported Christian education for Black people, shifted their perspective as racial tensions grew before the Civil War. On February 16, 1847, Missouri banned all education for Black people. While the new ordinance was not enforced en masse, police did force Meachum to close the school that same year.
Be it enacted by the General Assembly of the State of Missouri, as follows:
1. No person shall keep or teach any school for the instruction of negroes or mulattoes, in reading or writing, in this State.
2. No meeting or assemblage of negroes or mulattoes, for the purpose of religious worship, or preaching, shall be held or permitted where the services are performed or conducted by negroes or mulattoes, unless some sheriff, constable, marshal, police officer, or justice of the peace, shall be present during all the time of such meeting or assemblage, in order to prevent all seditious speeches, and disorderly and unlawful conduct of every kind.
The 1847 statute went beyond prohibiting education for Black children. It also targeted their freedom of worship and assembly. Worship services allowed slaves and former slaves to express themselves and their plight in a way that was otherwise unavailable to them. Sunday School was the central educational institution of Black life. Meachum developed a plan that circumvented the law without breaking it.
The couple purchased a steamboat called the Ben Campbell and equipped it with a library, tables, and benches to create a classroom. The Meachums anchored his vessel in the federally protected Mississippi River and ferried slave children to the steamboat in small skiffs. The “Floating Freedom School,” as it came to be known, was an act of defiance—demonstrating his willingness to go to great lengths to continue his education of Black students.
John Berry Meachum died in 1854 on the pulpit. 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. The school closed sometime after 1860.
After the death of her husband, Mary continued her abolitionist work through the Underground Railroad. With views across the Mississippi River, a site three miles north of downtown St. Louis commemorates the events of May 21, 1855, when a group of fugitive enslaved people attempted to cross the river from St. Louis to reach freedom in Illinois. Mary Meachum led the group across the river on the night of May 21, and Mary and five members of her party were caught and arrested under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. The location of their departure from St. Louis is marked by the Mary Meachum Freedom Crossing Site along St. Louis’ Riverfront Trail. In 2001, the site became the first in Missouri to be added to the National Park Service’s Underground Railroad Network to Freedom program.
The term civil disobedience, which is often used to describe the Civil Rights Movement, is inadequate to describe Meachum’s actions. Civil disobedience means knowingly breaking an unjust law and then suffering the consequences to appeal to the oppressor’s conscience. An earlier example of this is when Homer Plessy refused to leave a “whites only” train car in New Orleans in 1892. This event led to the landmark Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson, which stated that racial segregation laws did not violate the U.S. Constitution if the facilities for each race were equal in quality, a doctrine that came to be known as “separate but equal.” Meachum intentionally did not break the law. Examples of this tactics are most notably seen in the sit-in movement and the Freedom Rides.
Additional Primary Sources:
John B. Meachum, “An address to all the colored citizens of the United States,” 1846. Library of Congress.
Plessy vs. Ferguson, Judgement, Decided May 18, 1896; Records of the Supreme Court of the United States; Record Group 267; Plessy v. Ferguson, 163, #15248, National Archives.
Additional Resources:
PBS Learning Media Lesson for grades 9-12: Rise Up: The Fight for Freedom | The Black Church – From early slave rebellions to fighting in the Civil War, African Americans sought to rise up and fight for their freedom, with many of these efforts supported and advanced by the Black church. From the stories of the slave uprising in Haiti that gave way to the first Black republic to stories of American slave uprisings, this explores the demand for social transformation and is fueled by the Christian faith. This lesson ends with abolitionist Frederick Douglass who calls on Black men to rise up and fight for their freedom in the Civil War.
Listen to the Atlas Obscura Podcast episode on the Floating Freedom School.
Dennis L. Durst, “The Reverend John Berry Meachum (1789-1854) of St. Louis: Prophet and Entrepreneurial Black Educator in Historiographical Perspective,” The North Star: A Journal of African American Religious History, Volume 7, Number 2 (Spring 2004).
