Support for this podcast comes from the Newbauer Family Foundation, supporting W.HYY's Fresh Air and its commitment to sharing ideas and encouraging meaningful conversation. This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya Mosley. In July of 1874, waves of Black Americans rushed to their local bank branches to find out if the news they were

hearing was true. The Friedman's Savings and Trust Company, a bank for newly emancipated

black Americans, was abruptly shutting down, and patrons at bank branches throughout the country

were met with locked doors and cashiers who had to break the news. Most of their savings were gone.

The rise and fall of the Friedman's Savings and Trust Company is the subject of a new book by my guest, historian Justine Hill Edwards.

In the years after the Civil War, tens of thousands of formerly enslaved people deposited millions into the Freedmen's Bank with high hopes that as free people, they too could create a piece of the American dream for themselves.

Abolitionist Frederick Douglass even encouraged black Americans to trust the banking system, but even his leadership as the president before its collapse could not save it.

Hill Edwards' book documents how the bank's white trustees drove the bank to the ground by

lending out millions and loans to white financiers and businessmen.

Justine Hill Edwards is a historian and associate professor of history at the University of Virginia.

Her research explores the intersection of professor 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. Her book is called Savings and Trust. Justine Hill Edwards, welcome to

fresh air. Thank you so much for having me, Tanya. The Freedman's Bank, let's get into

how it was established. So white abolitionists established it in 1865. Take us back to that time period.

Who were these abolitionists and why was a bank for newly freed black people a priority?

So the Friedman's bank was established by, well, it was really the brainchild of a white abolitionist

minister named John Alvord. He was from Connecticut and he lived in New Jersey during the

Civil War. And in 1864, he was traveling with the Union Army

in the South, especially in the summer and fall of that year following Union General William

Sherman on his famed March to the Sea from Atlanta to Savannah. And he took the opportunity to talk to recently freed African

Americans. And what he found, what he gleaned from his conversations with them is that

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