FIRESIDE CHAT Savings and Trust: The Rise and Betrayal of the Freedman’s Bank
18feb7:00 pm8:00 pmFIRESIDE CHAT Savings and Trust: The Rise and Betrayal of the Freedman’s BankFree
Event Details
Fireside Chat with Justene Hill Edwards Savings and Trust: The Rise and Betrayal of the Freedman’s Bank Tuesday, February 18th, 2025 7:00 PM ET Virtual Event
Event Details
Fireside Chat with Justene Hill Edwards
Savings and Trust: The Rise and Betrayal of the Freedman’s Bank
Tuesday, February 18th, 2025
7:00 PM ET
Virtual Event | Free
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, 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.
Justene Hill Edwards is an associate professor of history at the University of Virginia. An Andrew Carnegie Fellow and a Mellon New Directions Fellow, she is a specialist in African American history, focusing on Black economic life in 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). 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.
Sponsored by the Program of Early American Economy and Society
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Time
February 18, 2025 7:00 pm - 8:00 pm(GMT-05:00)
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