The Freedom Suits Memorial is a 14-foot-tall bronze sculpture in downtown St. Louis, Missouri commemorating the lawsuits filed by more than 300 enslaved people in Missouri against slaveholders to assert claims to freedom. The statue sits on a black granite base, engraved with the names of the plaintiffs in what’s believed to be the largest known single collection of their identities. In 2006, court workers discovered the freedom lawsuits in a storage room while cleaning up. 

The $1 million memorial was designed by Chicago sculptor Preston Jackson in 2015 and unveiled On June 20, 2022, the first celebration of Juneteenth as a national holiday, on the east plaza of the Civil Courts Building in downtown St. Louis

The freedom suits were legal challenges that centered around the “once free, always free” theory. In Missouri, if enslaved people were taken to free states, they were then freed – even if they later returned to Missouri, a slave state. Hundreds of enslaved individuals used this precedent to sue for their freedom in St. Louis.  Dred and Harriet Scott won their freedom using the “once free, always free” precedent. The Supreme Court of Missouri overturned the “once free, always free” precedent in 1852 when it denied the Scotts’ freedom on appeal. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Dred Scott v. Sandford that everyone of African ancestry – enslaved individuals as well as those who were free – could not become citizens in the United States and therefore couldn’t sue in federal court. It also ruled that the federal government couldn’t prohibit slavery in its territories. The Scott ruling helped propel the nation into the Civil War in 1861.

The carved relied on the bronze paint a picture of the world in which the freedom suits occurred. The main scene depicts a freedom suit trial, the plaintiff portrayed as a woman, as were most freedom suit plaintiffs were women, as their freedom could also make their children free because enslaved status descended through the mother. On the south elevation of the statue, there is a riverfront scene showing enslaved workers on the levee with a steamboat’s tall smokestacks in the background. 

The dedication plaque provides an overview of the St. Louis freedom suits. The names of donors are engraved on the benches, and on granite plaques inlaid into a red brick pathway, the “Walk of Freedom.”