Savings and Trust: The Rise and Betrayal of the Freedman's Bank

A gripping read. Justene Hill Edwards's Savings and Trust tells the heartbreaking story of what began as an unqualified good and would become an origin story for subsequent iterations of anti-Black race discrimination perpetrated by the banking industry.--Dorothy A. Brown, author of The Whiteness of Wealth: How the Tax System Impoverishes Black Americans--and How We Can Fix It
Well-researched, brilliantly analyzed, and compellingly told, Savings and Trust brings to life the dramatic expansion of America's racial wealth gap with a focus on Black resourcefulness and trust and white betrayal and plunder during Reconstruction.--Kidada E. Williams, author of I Saw Death Coming: A History of Terror and Survival in the War against Reconstruction
In lucid prose, Justene Hill Edwards tells the tragic history of the rise and fall of the Freedman's Bank in a devastating, page-turning saga of predation, plunder, and trust betrayed.--W. Caleb McDaniel, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Sweet Taste of Liberty: A True Story of Slavery and Restitution in America
Following a rogue's gallery of bankers and politicians, Justene Hill Edwards deftly investigates a monumental financial crime. Savings and Trust is a significant contribution to the long and shameful history of America's racial wealth gap.--Claudio Saunt, author of Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory
Justene Hill Edwards give us the first modern and comprehensive history of the Freedman's Bank, beautifully capturing the hopes of its African American depositors after emancipation and their betrayal by speculators, feckless allies, and racist opponents. A brilliant, riveting, and timely book.--Manisha Sinha, The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction 1860-1920
Savings and Trust is a crucial piece of the story of the racial wealth gap and the financial violence that produced it with such devastating consequences into the present.--Stephanie McCurry, author of Women's War: Fighting and Surviving the American Civil War
Savings and Trust is a work of restorative justice, boldly holding accountable those who tragically privileged self-interest over the possibility of a just and equitable interracial democracy after the Civil War.--Martha S. Jones, Johns Hopkins University, author of Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All
In Justene Hill Edwards's hands, the Freedman's Bank's story is about much more than economics. With elegant prose and the flair of a master storyteller, she captures the promises of Reconstruction and their betrayal, which dashed the lives of Black Americans who dared to trust in the prospect of change and left the United States with a toxic legacy that persists today.--Laura F. Edwards, author of Only the Clothes on Her Back: Clothing and the Hidden History of Power in the Nineteenth-Century United States
By mining through Congressional records and financial documents, Black newspapers and organizational minutes, dusty ledgers and dizzying appendices, Justene Hill Edwards in electrifying prose tells the heartbreaking story of the Freedman's Saving and Trust Bank and the origins of the racial wealth gap.--Jim Downs, author of Maladies of Empire: How Colonialism, Slavery, and War Transformed Medicine
A passionate, patient, and poignant retelling of the betrayal of the Freedman's Bank. Savings and Trust leaves us with an unavoidable truth: any racial reckoning in America must atone for the federal government's systematic betrayal of Black people's trust in its institutions, ideals, and promises.--Destin Jenkins, author of The Bonds of Inequality: Debt and the Making of the American City
This is a revealing history of banking innovation and experimentation, the financial acuity of Black men and women, corruption among powerful trustees, and the failure of Congressional oversight that feels all too familiar in our own era of bank failures, governmental dysfunction, and financial malfeasance. Justene Hill Edwards argues convincingly that the Freedman's Bank debacle that lost millions of dollars earned and saved by hardworking, self-sacrificing, recently enslaved people is another little-known cause of the contemporary racial wealth gap.--Tiya Miles, National Book Award-winning author of All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake
America's racial wealth gap can be traced to the collapse of the Freedman's Savings and Trust Company in 1874, according to this ingenious work of financial sleuthing.... [A] captivating narrative that reads like a slow-burn legal thriller.--Publishers Weekly, starred
Savings and Trust, in beautifully written and accessible prose, is a must-read that offers crucial context for understanding the economic plight of formerly enslaved people after the Civil War, racial capitalism, the racial wealth gap, and contemporary calls for reparations.--Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers, author of They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South
In her gripping and elegantly written account of the Freedman's Bank, Justene Hill Edwards illuminates the extent to which the insidious backlash to Reconstruction resonates with us today. An essential read for anyone concerned about racial and economic justice.--Marcia Chatelain, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America
The failure of the Freedman's Bank, so damaging to Black Americans' hopes through no fault of their own, has never been explained as fully or fairly as it is in this eloquent book. Justene Hill Edwards, with careful research and deep compassion, finally sets the accounts straight by assigning debt and credit to their proper places.--Edward L. Ayers, author of American Visions: The United States, 1800-1860
This tragic history originates the American racial wealth gap in which, again and again, Black people accumulate wealth, only to have it stolen from them. This book, as essential as it is heartrending, offers a fundamental understanding of American history's entanglement of racism and capitalism.--Nell Irvin Painter, author of I Just Keep Talking: A Life in Essays
Deeply researched and powerfully argued, Savings and Trust shows how, at the dawn of emancipation, Black aspirations for an expansive freedom were undermined by the greed and thieving of their purported white Republican allies. Little known and short-lived, the Freedman's Bank nonetheless cast a long and dark shadow over the prospects for racial equality and justice in the United States.--Steven Hahn, author of Illiberal America: A History
Devastating to Black depositors and communities, the collapse of the Freedman's Bank created generations of distrust and helped lay the foundation for the racial wealth gap that remains today. With vivid prose and extensive research, Justene Hill Edwards's account is a disturbingly relevant reminder that financial disasters do not simply happen. They are made.--Joshua D. Rothman, author of The Ledger and the Chain: How Domestic Slave Traders Shaped America
In lucid, unsparing prose, Justene Hill Edwards's story of shattered dreams and betrayed ideals resonates far beyond the era of Reconstruction, raising timely questions about the origins of the racial wealth gap, while delivering a warning about the risks that unregulated capitalism poses to all Americans.--Dylan C. Penningroth, author of Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights
A timely, well-crafted account by Justene Hill Edwards, a historian at the University of Virginia. It makes for a riveting and heartbreaking read.--Richard Kreitner "The New York Times"
A saga worth recounting. For recently freed blacks, the collapse of Freedman's was a bitter pill, and it foreshadowed the fate of Reconstruction.--Roger Lowenstein "Wall Street Journal"