The Floating Freedom School was an educational facility for free and enslaved African Americans on a steamboat on the Mississippi River.

In 1847, John Berry Meachum was forced to close the school he had been operating in a St. Louis church basement.

Earlier that year, the Missouri legislature had passed a law that made it illegal to provide "the instruction of negroes or mulattoes, in reading or writing".

[2] To circumvent the new state law in Missouri, Reverend Meachum bought a steamboat which he anchored in the middle of the Mississippi River, thus placing it under the authority of the federal government.

[5] One of the early students was James Milton Turner, who would go on to establish 30 new schools for African Americans in Missouri after the Civil War.