Items

Explore individual items gathered for collections and exhibits centered around particular themes, people, places, or events.

• Old Courthouse - Sold on the Steps of Justice Re-Do – The Last Slave Sale

  On New Year’s Day of 1861, one of the last slave sales took place on the Courthouse steps in St. Louis, Missouri. For decades, enslaved people would be sold on these steps as their owners found themselves bankrupt or facing death. Citizens would gather around and watch as enslaved people of all ages would be taken out one by one and humiliated in front of everyone as white men would bid on them. Throughout the year 1861, at least four more sales took place, the last known one being on May 4th where six slaves were sold. The final slave sales were momentous as they demonstrated the decline in the St. Louis area in the support of slavery.
• The Freedom for Residence Committee

  In an effort to desegregate St. Louis’ middle-class neighborhoods during the mid-20th century, volunteers from the Black community came together to create the Freedom for Residence Committee in 1961. This committee was the result of discriminatory practices found in the St. Louis housing market. While promoting the “New Era in Housing” this group successfully integrated neighborhoods across St. Louis and were a prominent figure in the Jones vs. Mayer case that ruled against racial discrimination in real estate.
• Old Chouteau Mansion - Marguerite Scypion and the First Freedom Suit in St. Louis

  Marguerite Scypion was an African-Natchez woman who filed the first freedom suit in St. Louis in 1806. This was nearly fifty years before the Dred Scott case was filed. Marguerite and her sisters used their Indigenous ancestry to argue that their mother, Marie Jean Scypion was unlawfully enslaved by the Tayon family after Native American slavery was abolished in the Louisiana Territory in 1769. The Missouri Supreme Court finally declared these women as free citizens in 1838.