The St. Louis Board of Aldermen has voted to rename one of the city’s two courthouses after a pioneering judge.
The courthouse now known as the Civil Courts building on North Tucker Boulevard will be named for the late Clyde Cahill. The proposal passed unanimously on Friday, and Mayor Tishaura Jones is expected to sign it.
Cahill was the first Black federal judge for the Eastern District of Missouri and the second Black man to be a judge in the 22nd Circuit, the state court in St. Louis.
Cahill was a St. Louis native and served in the Army Air Corps, which became the Air Force, during World War II. He used the GI Bill to attend college and law school and spent seven years in the circuit attorney’s office before going into private practice.
In 1958, Cahill became the chief legal adviser to the Missouri NAACP. In that role, he would file the first lawsuit to enforce the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court ruling outlawing school segregation in Missouri. He would also represent protesters challenging the racist lending practices of Jefferson Bank.
Gov. Kit Bond named Cahill to the bench in the 22nd Judicial Circuit in St. Louis in 1975. Five years later, President Jimmy Carter appointed him to the federal judiciary. In that position, he took a stand on sentencing disparities for possession of cocaine versus crack. Cahill would remain a federal district judge until his death in 2004.
Also on Friday, the board approved a bill giving a block of 11th Street near the newly named Cahill courthouse the honorary name “Freedom Way,” marking the lawsuits filed by enslaved people in the 22nd Circuit to gain their freedom in the 19th century. In addition, a block of Chestnut Street near Soldiers Memorial in Downtown West will have the honorary name “Tuskegee Airman Way.” Fifty pilots from the famed fighter squad would call St. Louis home either before, during or after World War II.
