John R. Stockham was born on July 18, 1913, in Portsmouth, Ohio, to Russell and Julia Stockham. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Ohio University (Athens, Ohio) in 1935 and earned a master’s degree in social administration from The Ohio State University (Columbus, Ohio) in 1938. In Columbus, Stockham became involved in protests over segregation. While attending school, he worked part-time in the coal fields. Stockham married Dorothy Louise Radford in Athens, Ohio, on December 29, 1936. The couple moved to St. Louis when John entered Washington University’s School of Law. He graduated in 1942 and entered private practice with a specialty in labor law. John Stockham became a respected member of the city’s legal and civic communities. In 1948, he received the Junior Chamber of Commerce award for significant service to the community. Later he served as head of the Junior Chamber of Commerce and served on the Webster Groves Council for Public Education. He was active with many local and national associations, including the St. Louis Civil Liberties Committee, the Bar Association of St. Louis, the American Bar Association, the National Industrial Conference Board, and the Society for Applied Anthropology. In March 1966, the Industrial Relations Club of Greater St. Louis established a $1,000 scholarship at Washington University in his name. Dorothy was also active in civic activities. She served in the WAVES during World War II, was president of the Webster Groves League of Women Voters, taught a course on great books at the Webster Groves Public Library, and was a delegate to the regional White House Conference on Education. She prepared the booklet Know Your City, which was distributed by the Webster Groves Chamber of Commerce. In 1963, the Chamber of Commerce named her Citizen of the Year, the first woman to receive the honor. On February 1, 1964, Dorothy died at age 49 from carbon monoxide poisoning during a fire at the family’s Webster Groves home. She and daughter Anne led John Stockham, who had become blind, from the house, but Dorothy returned to find their son. John Jr. had already vacated the house. John R. Stockham died on October 8, 1966. Sidney Redmond (1902-1974) was the first African American attorney to apply for membership in the Bar Association of St. Louis. A graduate of Harvard College (1923) and Harvard Law School (1927), Redmond was among the most prominent lawyers in the country. Born into a wealthy and influential family in Jackson, Mississippi, Redmond’s father Sidney Dellon Redmond was a physician and an attorney. His mother Ida Revels Redmond was the daughter of Hiram Revels, the first African American to serve in the United States Senate (1870-1871). After practicing law with his father for two years, Redmond located to St. Louis in 1929 and immediately became active in local Republican politics and civil rights. In 1936, he successfully sued the St. Louis Board of Education, halting plans to place an elementary school on the grounds of an already overcrowded Vashon High School and soon after challenged segregated seating at the Municipal Auditorium. He is best known as one of the lead attorneys for Lloyd Gaines in Gaines v. Canada (1938), the Supreme Court case that mandated the University of Missouri to either admit Gaines to the university’s law school or establish a “separate but equal” facility (the State of Missouri chose the latter). The Gaines ruling is largely heralded as one of the key decisions that led to the eventual reversal of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). Redmond was president of the St. Louis Branch of the NAACP from 1937 until 1945 and was also a member of the national board of the NAACP. He was president of the Mound City Bar Association and the National Bar Association, both associations for African American attorneys. His political career included two terms as city alderman representing the 18th Ward, beginning in 1947, and two Republican primary elections for the United States House of Representatives. In 1948, Redmond applied for admission to the Bar Association of St. Louis, the first African American to do so. Although a majority of the members voted for his inclusion (275 for and 75 against), Redmond’s application was fifteen votes shy of the requisite four-fifths of the total votes cast. His shocking rejection was widely criticized by both the black and white press, including a searing editorial in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch accompanied by an equally biting Daniel Fitzpatrick political cartoon (January 26, 1949: State Historical Society of Missouri Editorial Cartoon Collection.)