Yale-GLC Frederick Douglass Book Talk: Justene Hill Edwards: Savings and Trust: The Rise and Betrayal of the Freedman’s Bank
Wednesday, February 11, 2026
Book Talk: 4:30pm—5:30pm | Reception: 5:30pm--6:00pm
Humanities Quadrangle Room 136, 320 York Street, New Haven, CT 06511
Yale University
The first ten people to register for and attend the in-person event will receive a free copy of the book.
Join Yale University’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition in celebrating the winner of the 2025 Frederick Douglass Book Prize.
Gilder Lehrman Center Director David Blight in conversation with
Justene Hill Edwards about Savings and Trust: The Rise and Betrayal of the Freedman’s Bank
In Savings and Trust, Justene Hill Edwards exposes how the rise and tragic failure of the Freedman’s Bank has shaped economic inequality in America. 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.
The Frederick Douglass Book Prize is jointly sponsored by the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History (GLI) in New York City and the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition (GLC) at Yale University. Established in 1999, the FDBP recognizes the best book written in English on the topics of slavery, resistance, or abolition copyrighted in the preceding year.
Speakers
Justene is an Associate Professor of History in the Corcoran Department of History at the University of Virginia. Her research explores the intersection of African American history, the history of slavery, and the history of American capitalism. In her work, she investigates slavery’s role in the long history of economic inequality in America, focusing on the 18th and 19th centuries.