Join us for a book talk with Justene Hill Edwards, author of Savings and Trust: The Rise and Betrayal of the Freedman's Bank. This in-person event will be free and open to the public. We recommend arriving early for the best seating.
About the Book: In the years immediately after the Civil War, tens of thousands of former slaves deposited millions of dollars into the Freedman's Bank. African Americans envisioned this new bank as a launching pad for economic growth and self-determination. But only nine years after it opened, their trust was betrayed and the Freedman's Bank collapsed.
Fully informed by new archival findings, historian Justene Hill Edwards unearths a major turning point in American history in this comprehensive account of the Freedman's Bank and its depositors. She illuminates the hope with which the bank was first envisioned and demonstrates the significant setback that the sabotage of the bank caused in the fight for economic autonomy. Hill Edwards argues for a new interpretation of its tragic failure: the bank's white financiers drove the bank into the ground, not Fredrick Douglass, its final president, or its Black depositors and cashiers. A page-turning story filled with both well-known figures like Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Jay and Henry Cooke, and General O. O. Howard, and less well-known figures like Dr. Charles B. Purvis, John Mercer Langston, Congressman Robert Smalls, and Ellen Baptiste Lubin, Savings and Trust is necessary reading for those seeking to understand the roots of racial economic inequality in America.
About the Author: Justene Hill Edwards is an associate professor of history at the University of Virginia. An Andrew Carnegie Fellow and Mellon New Directions Fellow, her forthcoming book, Savings and Trust: The Rise and Betrayal of the Freedman's Bank (October 2024, W.W. Norton), unearths a major turning point in American history in this comprehensive account of the Freedman's Bank and its depositors. She is also the author of Unfree Markets: The Slaves' Economy and the Rise of Capitalism in South Carolina. Always highlighting the lives of enslaved and formerly enslaved people, Hill Edwards studies the relationship between economic and political freedom for people of African descent in the United States.
