“Savings and Trust: The Rise and Betrayal of the Freedman's Bank” presentation at MPAAGHS Monthly Meeting

Dec 13, 2025

Middle Peninsula African-American Genealogical and Historical Society (MPAAGHS) will hold its monthly meeting virtually on Saturday, December 13, 2025, at 11:00 AM Eastern Time. The meeting will feature a talk by historian Justene Hill Edwards about her book, Savings and Trust: The Rise and Betrayal of the Freedman’s Bank. The book is a comprehensive account of the Freedman’s Bank and its depositors.

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. She will discuss the bank’s tragic history and connect the bank’s failure to the roots of racial economic inequality in America today.

Justene Hill Edwards is an associate professor of history at the University of Virginia. A specialist in African American history, 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 and the 2025 Virginia Literary Award for Nonfiction. She received a B.A. from Swarthmore College, an M.A. from Florida International University, and a Ph.D. from Princeton University.

MPAAGHS 2026 dues ($25) are now due and may be paid electronically via MPAAGHS’s Payments webpage or by mailing checks made payable to MPAAGHS to:
MPAAGHS
4114 Tidewater Trail
Jamaica, VA 23079

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