Frederick Douglass Book Prize Celebrates Justene Hill Edwards’ Research on the Freedman’s Bank and Reconstruction

The collapse of the Freedman’s Savings and Trust Company remains one of the most consequential but overlooked financial failures of the Reconstruction era.

This year’s Frederick Douglass Book Prize honors historian Justene Hill Edwards for Savings and Trust: The Rise and Betrayal of the Freedman’s Bank, a book that reframes Reconstruction not only as a political transformation but also as a defining struggle over economic citizenship. Awarded annually for the best book in English on slavery, abolition, or their enduring consequences, the prize recognizes research that both deepens scholarly inquiry and engages the public in critical historical dialogue.

The Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University’s MacMillan Center and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History jointly celebrated Hill Edwards through a public conversation on campus followed by an award ceremony at Trinity Church in New York City.

At Yale, Hill Edwards spoke with David Blight, Sterling Professor of History and Director of the Yale Gilder Lehrman Center, about the broader significance of the Freedman’s Bank’s collapse. Their conversation examined the role of Frederick Douglass, who assumed the bank’s presidency in a final effort to restore trust and later testified before Congress. They also connected nineteenth-century financial instability to contemporary disparities in access to capital and the enduring mistrust of financial institutions among Black communities.

Chartered in 1865 to serve newly emancipated African Americans, the Freedman’s Bank collected roughly $7 million over nine years. For tens of thousands of Black depositors, opening an account represented a step toward full participation in American civic life. Hill Edwards explained that the White trustees of the Bank made risky investments, granted unsecured loans to associates, and operated with little federal oversight. When the institution collapsed in 1874, thousands lost their savings, with lasting consequences for Black wealth and trust in financial institutions.