Freedom Lost, Freedom Won
A Personal History of America
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- $20.99
Publisher Description
Pulitzer Prize–winning former Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson tells our nation’s torturous racial history through his own family’s story, starting with his great-grandfather’s freedom from slavery and threading his way to his own narrative and reaching today’s Black Lives Matter movement, asking whether this time will be different.
On March 27, 1829, a wealthy white planter and entrepreneur named Richard Fordham purchased four enslaved African Americans from a woman named Isabella Perman. One of them was journalist Eugene Robinson’s great-great-grandfather, a boy called Harry.
Starting from this transaction, which took place in Charleston, South Carolina, Freedom Lost, Freedom Won brings to life 200 years of our nation’s history through the eyes of the remarkable family that Harry founded. Assigned a formal name—Henry Fordham—and put to work as a blacksmith, he achieved his own freedom a decade before the Civil War. He was there when victorious Union troops marched into Charleston in 1865, ending slavery and guaranteeing liberty for Black people—only on paper, though, and only for a time.
Robinson traces the arc of his familial lineage through the repeated cycles in which African Americans have fought their way upward toward freedom and opportunity, been forced back down again, and renewed their determined climb.
From his great-great-grandfather’s achievement in becoming a “free person of color” before emancipation to his great-grandfather’s Reconstruction-era success, from his father’s odyssey of the Great Migration to his own coming-of-age during the civil rights movement, Robinson delves into a rich archive of Black narratives, arguing that we still have a long way to go before it is possible to speak of a “post-racial America.”
Setting his extensive research within the larger historical context, Robinson provides both an indictment of structural racism and an illustration of how it has been fought and, at times, courageously overcome. Freedom Lost, Freedom Won tells our country’s tortuous racial history through Robinson’s family’s story of struggle and survival, pushing us to consider how far the nation has come—willingly or not—and how far it still has to go.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this elegant account, former Washington Post columnist and Pulitzer Prize winner Robinson (Disintegration) uses his own family tree as a window onto Black history. Spanning five generations, the narrative illustrates the halting two steps forward, one step back progress toward equality that characterizes civil rights in the U.S.. Those profiled include Robinson's great-grandfather Major Fordham, born in 1856, who "took advantage of fleeting Reconstruction-era opportunity" to become a lawyer and politician before Jim Crow hindered his ability to rise further, and his great-uncle Marion, who was drafted to serve in the legendary segregated Buffalo Soldiers infantry division in WWI and returned home to the Red Summer of 1919, when white mobs attacked Black people in cities across America. As Robinson situates his family members within major events in U.S. history, he notes, again and again, how white history comes to dominate and obliterate Black history. He gives as one example the 1968 Orangeburg Massacre, the killing of three Black students during a civil rights protest. Few know of the slaying today, Robinson observes, compared to the Kent State shooting two years later, highlighting how "the nation's historical memory gives primacy" to whiteness. Novelistic and at times achingly poignant, it's a lyrical account of one family's hard-won achievements in the face of bitter oppression.
