Publishers Weekly
★ 09/09/2024
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. Historian Hill Edwards (Unfree Markets) shows that the bank—which canvassed the post-war South to encourage freed people to deposit their money, and at its height held more than $75 million in deposits ($1.9 trillion in today’s dollars)—underwent an “ideological change” within two years of its 1865 founding, when it moved in 1867 from New York to Washington D.C., and Henry D. Cooke, brother of industrialist Jay Cooke, joined the Board of Trustees. Cooke immediately set about “raid” Black depositors’ money to make illegal loans to bank trustees and risky, influence-peddling investments, including extravagant loans to politicians. By 1870, whiffs of the bank’s insolvency and corruption had reached the public. In a captivating narrative that reads like a slow-burn legal thriller, Hill Edwards proves how, in a particularly perfidious last-minute effort to salvage the faith of Black depositors, the bank’s white trustees elected a “completely unprepared” Frederick Douglass to serve as president just three months before the bank’s collapse, permanently scarring the orator’s legacy. The result is a revelatory connecting-of-the-dots between the failure of Reconstruction and the birth of the Gilded Age. (Oct.)
Steven Hahn
"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."
Joshua D. Rothman
"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."
Marcia Chatelain
"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."
Edward L. Ayers
"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."
Kidada E. Williams
"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."
Martha S. Jones
"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."
Dorothy A. Brown
"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."
Laura F. Edwards
"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."
Dylan C. Penningroth
"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."
Manisha Sinha
"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."
Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers
"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."
Tiya Miles
"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."
W. Caleb McDaniel
"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."
Jim Downs
"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."
Claudio Saunt
"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."
Stephanie McCurry
"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."
Nell Irvin Painter
"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."
Destin Jenkins
"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."
