Justene Hill Edwards is Associate Professor of History at the University of Virginia. This interview is based on her new book, Savings and Trust: The Rise and Betrayal of the Freedman’s Bank (W. W. Norton & Company, 2024).
JF: What led you to write Savings and Trust?
JHE: I started thinking about the idea of writing a book about the Freedman’s Bank when I was finishing my PhD at Princeton. I was living in Washington, DC at the time and one day my now-husband asked me about the Freedman’s Bank because he had seen a plaque on the Treasury Annex that briefly described its history. I was immediately interested in the topic and after doing a scan of the literature, I became interested in why there was not more scholarship on the Freedman’s Bank. There are two books, one published in 1927 and the other published in 1976, and a handful of good book chapters and scholarly articles. But there was no synthetic book on the bank’s history that had considered all of the recent discussions—both inside and outside of the academy—about the racial wealth gap, the relationship between slavery and capitalism, and the connection between racial and economic inequality.
As I was finishing my first book, Unfree Markets: The Slaves’ Economy and the Rise of Capitalism in South Carolina, I realized that I wanted to update the literature on the Freedman’s Bank. I also wanted to extend the work that I did in my first book about the economic lives of enslaved people. I wondered: What happened to Black people economically as they made the transition from enslaved to free? Researching and writing about the Freedman’s Bank helped me answer this question.
As I learned more about the bank, the bank’s administrators, and most importantly, about the bank’s Black depositors, I started thinking more about how Black depositors’ experiences with the bank may have had a longer term effect on them and their descendants. I was also interested in the larger conversations that social scientists and politicians were having about the racial wealth gap. I wanted to understand how the era of Reconstruction, and the bank’s failure, influenced the challenges that African Americans continue to face now around the issue of financial inclusion. Savings and Trust is my contribution to this conversation.
JF: In 2 sentences, what is the argument of Savings and Trust?
JHE: In Savings and Trust, I argue that one of the origins of America’s racial wealth gap was the failure of the Freedman’s Bank in 1874. I show that the Freedman’s Bank represented the first attempt by the federal government and the banking industry at Black financial inclusion—and unfortunately the bank collapsed.
JF: Why do we need to read Savings and Trust?
JHE: When people talk about the racial wealth gap, the conversation often revolves around the modern Civil Rights Movement and the federal government’s push to enshrine economic policies to protect consumers from discrimination, the Fair Housing Act of 1968 and the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977, for example. But to fully understand the roots of the racial wealth gap, we have to look at the 1860s and 1870s with the Freedman’s Bank. During Reconstruction, African Americans were entering the period of universal freedom and yearning for economic stability. The Freedman’s Bank was supposed help African Americans in that goal. But when the bank’s white trustees used the bank’s deposits—freed peoples’ money—for their own risky investments, the bank failed. The collapse of the Freedman’s Bank had generational consequences for the African American communities. The memory of the bank’s failure—and Black peoples’ distrust of white-owned banks—continued to shape how African Americans thought about their patronage of traditional financial institution into the 20th and 21 centuries.
JF: Why and when did you become an Am​erican historian?
JHE: I did not dream of becoming an historian as a young person. In fact, I’m still a little shocked that this is my profession! But, if you ask my family, they’d probably say that they are not surprised. As a child, I loved reading and writing. After I graduated from college, and worked at a law firm as a paralegal for 2 years, I realized quickly that I missed—and really enjoyed—the deep work of historical analysis, reading primary sources, and trying to understand what other scholars have written about a given topic. I decided to get a master’s degree in African Diaspora Studies and with that experience, I learned that I was drawn to the questions that historians ask. I also liked to read history more than any other field. It was during the first year in my M.A. program that I decided that I wanted to be a historian, and that I wanted to study the history of slavery in America.
JF: What is your next project?
JHE: I am working on a concise history of inequality in America for the Norton Shorts series. It is helping me understand how Americans have understood and attempted to address inequality in American society.
JF: Thanks, Justene!