Polly Berry

Polly Berry, also known as Polly Crockett and Polly Wash (b. ca. 1818 – d. ca. 1870–1880), was an enslaved African American woman who on October 3, 1839 filed a freedom suit in St. Louis, Missouri, which she won in 1843 based on having been held illegally as a slave for an extended period of time in the free state of Illinois. In 1842 Berry sued for the freedom of her daughter Lucy Ann Berry, based on partus (the child is born into the status of the mother), which she won in 1844 in a case argued by Edward Bates, the future U.S. Attorney General under President Abraham Lincoln.

Polly Berry's life is primarily known through her daughter's memoir, From the Darkness Cometh the Light, or, Struggles for Freedom, the only first-person account of a freedom suit. The daughter published her slave narrative in 1891 under her married name of Lucy Delaney. In the 1990s, the case files of these two suits were among more than 300 freedom suits discovered among nineteenth-century Circuit Court records in St. Louis. They provide some facts different from Delaney's account. The Missouri State Archives and Washington University have created a searchable online database of the freedom suit files containing images of the complete case files held by the Circuit Court of the City of St. Louis & the Missouri Historical Society.