BLACK CREATIVE EDUCATION

Black people had to be creative to become educated in olden days.. It was against the law for black people to be taught by anyone, or to be preached to by black preachers in Missouri in 1847. To get around the legal ban, John Berry Meachum, a freed slave, entrepreneur ((barrel-maker), first black church in Missouri founder, and educator, moved his school to a steamboat that he moored in the middle of the Mississippi River, federal property. Tuition was $1.00. 300 students caught a skiff each day from St. Louis to the steamboat freedom school. One of those students was James Milton Turner, for whom my grade school in Meachum Park, Missouri, was named. Turner also established public education for blacks all over Missouri, when he served as Asst. Education Commission during Reconstruction, including Lincoln University in Jefferson Meachum creativity was matched by Booker T. Washington's mobile schools, which took education to rural blacks, who did not have access to Tuskegee, or means of enlightenment. No reason exists not to become useful, educated, valuable, now!