John Berry Meachum

John Berry Meachum (1789-1854) was an American pastor, businessman, educator and founder of the oldest black church in Missouri. Meachum circumvented a Missouri state law banning education for black people by creating the Floating Freedom School on a steamboat on the Mississippi River.

Meachum was born into slavery in Goochland County, Virginia on May 3, 1789. He was taken to North Carolina and then Kentucky by his owner, where he learned several trades, including carpentry. At 21, he had earned enough money from carpentry to purchase his own freedom and, shortly afterwards, the freedom of his father. His wife Mary Meachum, still enslaved, was taken by her owners to St. Louis in 1815, but Meachum was able to buy her freedom as well and moved to St. Louis to be with her.

In St. Louis, Meachum met white Baptist missionary John Mason Peck. With Peck, he started the African Church of St. Louis (later renamed the First Baptist Church of St. Louis), where he taught religious and secular classes to free and enslaved black students. After he was ordained in 1825, Meachum constructed a separate building at the same location for his church and school, which he called "The Candle Tallow School."

The school, which cost a dollar per person for tuition for those who could afford to pay, attracted 300 pupils. Around the same time, St. Louis passed an ordinance banning the education of free blacks, and the school was forced to close down.

In 1847, the state of Missouri banned all education for black people. In response, Meachum moved his classes to a steamboat in the middle of the Mississippi River, which was beyond the reach of Missouri law. He provided the school with a library, desks, and chairs, and called it the “Floating Freedom School”. One of Meachums' students was James Milton Turner, who went on after the Civil War to found the Lincoln Institute, the first school of higher education for black students in Missouri.

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