Freedom Plaza gets chosen for National Parks Service program

A three-year-old downtown site has been tapped for an important network—one that backers hope will drive even more interest in the history that it illuminates.

The Freedom Suits Memorial in front of the Civil Courthouse downtown honors the lawsuits filed by enslaved people in antebellum St. Louis. Dred and Harriet Scott were only the most famous of the 326 individuals that researchers have identified. 

Now the statue—and what’s been named Freedom Plaza, which sits around it at Tucker and Market—has been added to the National Parks Service’s National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom Program, which highlights 800 places and programs around the U.S. that focus on enslaved freedom seekers.

Paul Venker, the attorney who helped shepherd the project along with then-Circuit Court Judge David Mason, says he’s “ecstatic” about the determination. He says it could function as a “seal of approval” for the project, as well as a distinction that may bring visitors.

“Being recognized by the National Park Service, hopefully the people who may not otherwise have thought, ‘I’ll take a look at this,’ they’ll take a look,” he says. “This lets us start that process for people.”

Anne Twitty, a Missouri native who is now a professor at Stanford University, helped the Freedom Suits Memorial Foundation, of which Venker is now president, make the case for the site’s inclusion. (Twitty is also a board member for the foundation.)

“When we think about how enslaved people escaped slavery, we tend to think about those who ran away,” Twitty said in a prepared statement. “But the St. Louis freedom suits plaintiffs show that there were other avenues for obtaining freedom. Our site differs from many others that are already part of the Network, because filing a freedom suit represented a fundamentally different strategy for becoming free, one with its own obstacles and hazards.”

The foundation put it in its application in January. The designation being granted just as the Old Courthouse, where the freedom suits were filed, reopens after five years of renovations is felicitous timing, Venker says. 

And more good things are coming. The foundation is working on increasing educational information on its website, Venker says. And for visitors to the physical site, he notes that the Brickline Greenway now under construction will eventually connect the Pillars of the Valley memorial honoring Mill Creek Valley at Market and 22nd Street to Freedom Plaza, and then, six blocks to the West, the Old Courthouse. “We’re kind of a halfway point between 22nd street and the Old Courthouse,” he says—making for a great, compact walking tour of significant sites to Black history in St. Louis.