Jackie Sumell, Free Soil Party
Date: Friday, June 16, 2023
Time: 5-7:30PM
Location: MLK Roofing and Construction, 1215 S Jefferson Ave, St. Louis, MO 63104
Details:
Please join jackie sumell and the Counterpublic Team for an evening of conversations, libations, feasting, and activities on June 16 at the former site of Du-Good Chemical Laboratory (now MLK Roofing & Construction), where Lincoln Duiguid, an independent Black chemist, innovated healing medicines from plants. During the event, guests from St. Louis’s plant and justice movements will speak to the material histories of the colonial city, including the clay ground from which the city’s brick architecture was constructed and the mechanism that trafficked removed bricks from black neighborhoods down the Mississippi River to construct neo-plantation-style homes in New Orleans, where sumell is based. By crushing St. Louis bricks, participants in the event will make “free soil” that can be used to grow native pollinator plants. Unwalled and self-sustaining, the plants that will grow from the seeds in sumell’s free soil throughout the Counterpublic exhibition are available to all who can make use of them.
sumell’s “free soil” is a play on words and history. The Free Soil Party was a short-lived political party formed in 1848 and based in St. Louis. The party’s sole platform—that slavery should not follow settlement with westward expansion and that freemen, instead, should be given free land like all other settlers—is summarized by their motto: “Free Soil, Free Speech, Free Labor, and Free Men.” But rather than a radical promise of freedom for all, the party’s goal in abolishing slavery was to abolish the forced labor that competed with paying jobs for white men. In other words, in this settler-colonial version of abolition, to be free is to earn the right to participate in dispossession. This gathering is a reparative gesture to the imperfections of historical abolitionist movements and contemporary manifestations of dispossession of St. Louis’s communities.
