This past Saturday, just two weeks after the 165th anniversary of the death of Dred Scott, his great-great granddaughter, Lynne M. Jackson, led a ceremony dedicating a new, fitting, nine-foot-tall, black granite cemetery monument in Calvary Cemetery to honor this most well-known male of all freedom suits plaintiffs, who was originally buried there in an unmarked grave in 1867.
On that beautiful, sunny morning, in one of most iconic of St. Louis’s cemeteries for its historical rich and famous, nearly one-hundred people gathered to celebrate the unflinching determination and ironclad courage of a seemingly invisible Black American. Invisible, that is, until the United States Supreme Court saw fit in 1857 to attempt to completely obliterate not only Dred Scott’s dignity as a human being, but also that of every other Black American, regardless whether born or unborn.
Lynne Jackson masterfully coordinated this memorial program to be delivered with a delicate balance of the powerful and the poignant. Its elements were in prose, poetry, and song to both remind us of the horrid past of slavery, but also to buoy us through the present into a new, brighter future. Speakers included two board members of the Freedom Suits Memorial Foundation – Lynne M. Jackson and professor David T. Konig – as well as descendant Dred Scott Madison, II, Dr. Kimberly Norwood, and Louise LeBourgeois, a descendant of Dred Scott’s one-time enslaver’s family, whose other members helped fund Dred Scott’s freedom suit and then bought his freedom.
Paul N. Venker
President
Freedom Suits Memorial Foundation
FREEDOM SUITS MEMORIAL FOUNDATION 