Join us Tuesday, March 3, 2026, at 7 p.m. CT, as historian Dr. Justene Hill Edwards exposes how the rise and tragic failure of the Freeman’s Bank has shaped economic inequality in America in her latest book, Savings and Trust: The Rise and Betrayal of the Freedman's Bank.

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.

Justene Hill Edwards is an associate professor of history at the University of Virginia. She is a specialist in African American history, and her research examines Black economic life in America, focusing on 18^th and 19^th-century America.  She is the author of Savings and Trust: The Rise and Betrayal of the Freedman’s Bank (2024, W.W. Norton) and Unfree Markets: The Slaves’ Economy and the Rise of Capitalism in South Carolina (2021, Columbia University Press).  Hill Edwards has won numerous fellowships and awards, most recently an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship, a Mellon New Directions Fellowship, and the Harold F. Williamson Prize from the Business History Conference.  In 2024, she was awarded an inaugural Dean’s Research Fellowship by the College and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Virginia.  Hill Edwards is on the editorial boards of The Journal of the Civil War Era, Enterprise & Society, and the University of Virginia Press.  She serves as a trustee of the Midland School, the Shockoe Institute, and the Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library.  She received a B.A. from Swarthmore College, an M.A. from Florida International University, and a Ph.D. from Princeton University.

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