Founded in 1903 and named for abolitionist Moses Dickson, who died in 1901 and was re-interred there, Father Dickson Cemetery in St. Louis was one of the first public cemeteries in the city available to African Americans and holds veterans from every U.S. war from the Civil War through the Korean War. It is also the burial place of James Milton Turner, born enslaved in St. Louis County in 1839 and freed on December 5, 1843, who studied at Reverend John Berry Meachum's clandestine Candle Tallow School and later at Oberlin College, served as a civilian aide to Madison Miller during the Civil War until being wounded at Shiloh in April 1862, returned $4,000 entrusted to him to Miller's wife when Miller was thought dead, and gained the support of the Fletcher family; Turner became Assistant Superintendent of Public Schools in 1867, where he pressed local officials to meet obligations for equal educational opportunity under Missouri's 1865 constitution, was credited with delivering 20,000 African American votes to Republicans in the 1870 elections, and in 1871 was appointed by President Ulysses S. Grant as Resident and Consul General to Liberia, becoming the first African American born into slavery to serve as a foreign diplomat for the United States. He later helped support the Lincoln Institute, which grew from donations made in 1866 by soldiers of Missouri's 62nd and 65th U.S. Colored Troops, regiments formed from the state's early African American enlistments after the Emancipation Proclamation took effect on January 1, 1863; more than 8,000 men enrolled in Missouri's African American regiments, and the 62nd fought at Palmetto Ranch in May 1865 before men of the 62nd and 65th, together with their white officers, gave more than $6,000 to establish a school for African Americans in Missouri that became Lincoln University. Dickson, born free in Ohio on April 5, 1824, formed the Knights of Liberty in St. Louis in 1846 with eleven other men to organize an army of slaves for the violent overthrow of slavery, later served in the Union army, helped found the Missouri Equal Rights League, became an African Methodist Episcopal minister, and in 1872 founded the International Order of Twelve Knights and Daughters of Tabor, a benevolent association that by the 1900s claimed 100,000 members in 30 states and foreign countries; he died in St. Louis on November 28, 1901.
