Savings and Trust: The Rise and Betrayal of the Freedman's Bank

Savings and Trust: The Rise and Betrayal of the Freedman's Bank PDF Author: Justene Hill Edwards
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 1324073861
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
A leading historian exposes how the rise and tragic failure of the Freedman’s Bank has shaped economic inequality in America. 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. A page-turning story filled with both well-known figures like Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Jay and Henry Cooke, and General O. O. Howard, and less well-known figures like Dr. Charles B. Purvis, John Mercer Langston, Congressman Robert Smalls, and Ellen Baptiste Lubin. Savings and Trust is necessary reading for those seeking to understand the roots of racial economic inequality in America.

Savings and Trust: The Rise and Betrayal of the Freedman's Bank

Savings and Trust: The Rise and Betrayal of the Freedman's Bank PDF Author: Justene Hill Edwards
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 1324073861
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 242

Get Book Here

Book Description
A leading historian exposes how the rise and tragic failure of the Freedman’s Bank has shaped economic inequality in America. 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. A page-turning story filled with both well-known figures like Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Jay and Henry Cooke, and General O. O. Howard, and less well-known figures like Dr. Charles B. Purvis, John Mercer Langston, Congressman Robert Smalls, and Ellen Baptiste Lubin. Savings and Trust is necessary reading for those seeking to understand the roots of racial economic inequality in America.

Freedmen, Philanthropy, and Fraud

Freedmen, Philanthropy, and Fraud PDF Author: Carl R. Osthaus
Publisher: Urbana : University of Illinois Press
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
History of Freedman's Savings and Trust Company in Washington, D.C.

Unfree Markets

Unfree Markets PDF Author: Justene Hill Edwards
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231549261
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 180

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Book Description
The everyday lives of enslaved people were filled with the backbreaking tasks that their enslavers forced them to complete. But in spare moments, they found time in which to earn money and obtain goods for themselves. Enslaved people led vibrant economic lives, cultivating produce and raising livestock to trade and sell. They exchanged goods with nonslaveholding whites and even sold products to their enslavers. Did these pursuits represent a modicum of freedom in the interstices of slavery, or did they further shackle enslaved people by other means? Justene Hill Edwards illuminates the inner workings of the slaves’ economy and the strategies that enslaved people used to participate in the market. Focusing on South Carolina from the colonial period to the Civil War, she examines how the capitalist development of slavery influenced the economic lives of enslaved people. Hill Edwards demonstrates that as enslavers embraced increasingly capitalist principles, enslaved people slowly lost their economic autonomy. As slaveholders became more profit-oriented in the nineteenth century, they also sought to control enslaved people’s economic behavior and capture the gains. Despite enslaved people’s aptitude for enterprise, their market activities came to be one more part of the violent and exploitative regime that shaped their lives. Drawing on wide-ranging archival research to expand our understanding of racial capitalism, Unfree Markets shows the limits of the connection between economic activity and freedom.

The Rise and Fall of the Freedman's Savings Bank

The Rise and Fall of the Freedman's Savings Bank PDF Author: Rodney A. Brooks
Publisher: Spiramus Press Ltd
ISBN: 1913507521
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 187

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Book Description
The author tells the history of the Freedman’s Savings Bank, how it grew much too quickly, why it failed and the impact on Black America. The end of slavery in the United States left thousands of enslaved people with the need to survive the transition to freedom, including food, clothing, shelter, and medical care. They would also need education, money and financial services. In 1865 Congress passed legislation to create the Freedman’s Bureau to provide those services. It also created the Freedman’s Savings Bank. Large numbers of the formerly enslaved people had been paid for service in the Union Army – the first time many had cash. And they had no safe depository. The Freedman’s Bank offered that, expanding quickly and gained millions in deposits – mostly ranging from $5 to $50. But inexperience and corruption doomed it to failure, costing many of the small depositors their savings. Some of the biggest issues facing Black consumers today may be able to trace their roots back to this debacle, from the historical distrust in banks to the racial wealth gap. Why publish now? On the heels of the social justice protests of 2020 and the Covid pandemic, some of the persistent and long-lasting problems facing Black Americans bubbled to the top. Black Americans suffered more than White Americans – they got sicker and died more frequently. In addition, they bore the brunt of the job losses economically and business failures. White Americans (and many Black Americans) learned about how vibrant Black communities like Black Wall Street in Tulsa, Oklahoma, were burned to the ground by angry White mobs, destroying generational Black wealth. The racial wealth gap was pushed to the forefront of the debates. Many of those issues in the wealth gap – including the distrust of Banks and the lack of generational wealth in the Black community can be traced back to the collapse of the Freedman’s Savings Bank and the resulting loss of wealth and generational wealth in Black America. This book will put the Freedman’s Savings Bank in the conversation with reparations, Baby Bonds and financial literacy.

Until Justice Be Done: America's First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction

Until Justice Be Done: America's First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction PDF Author: Kate Masur
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 1324005947
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 480

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Book Description
Finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in History Finalist for the 2022 Lincoln Prize Winner of the 2022 John Nau Book Prize in American Civil War Era History One of NPR's Best Books of 2021 and a New York Times Critics' Top Book of 2021 A groundbreaking history of the movement for equal rights that courageously battled racist laws and institutions, Northern and Southern, in the decades before the Civil War. The half-century before the Civil War was beset with conflict over equality as well as freedom. Beginning in 1803, many free states enacted laws that discouraged free African Americans from settling within their boundaries and restricted their rights to testify in court, move freely from place to place, work, vote, and attend public school. But over time, African American activists and their white allies, often facing mob violence, courageously built a movement to fight these racist laws. They countered the states’ insistences that states were merely trying to maintain the domestic peace with the equal-rights promises they found in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. They were pastors, editors, lawyers, politicians, ship captains, and countless ordinary men and women, and they fought in the press, the courts, the state legislatures, and Congress, through petitioning, lobbying, party politics, and elections. Long stymied by hostile white majorities and unfavorable court decisions, the movement’s ideals became increasingly mainstream in the 1850s, particularly among supporters of the new Republican party. When Congress began rebuilding the nation after the Civil War, Republicans installed this vision of racial equality in the 1866 Civil Rights Act and the Fourteenth Amendment. These were the landmark achievements of the first civil rights movement. Kate Masur’s magisterial history delivers this pathbreaking movement in vivid detail. Activists such as John Jones, a free Black tailor from North Carolina whose opposition to the Illinois “black laws” helped make the case for racial equality, demonstrate the indispensable role of African Americans in shaping the American ideal of equality before the law. Without enforcement, promises of legal equality were not enough. But the antebellum movement laid the foundation for a racial justice tradition that remains vital to this day.

Saving Capitalism

Saving Capitalism PDF Author: James Stuart Olson
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400886945
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 259

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Book Description
For two generations historians have debated the significance of the New Deal, arguing about what it tried and tried not to do, whether it was radical or reactionary, and what its origins were. They have emphasized the National Recovery Administration, Agricultural Adjustment Administration, Tennessee Valley Authority, or the various social and labor legislation to illustrate an assortment of arguments about the "real" New Deal. Here James Olson contends that the little-studied Reconstruction Finance Corporation was the major New Deal agency, even though it was the product of the Hoover Administration. Pouring more than ten billion dollars into private businesses during the 1930s in a strenuous effort to "save capitalism," the RFC was the largest, most powerful, and most influential of all New Deal agencies, proving that the main thrust of the New Deal was state capitalism--the use of the federal government to shore up private property and the status quo. As national and international money markets collapsed in 1930, Hoover created an RFC with a structure similar to that of his War Finance Corporation. The agency was given two billion dollars to make low-interest loans to commercial banks, savings banks, other financial institutions, and railroads. With modifications, it survived the ultimate collapse of the economy in 1933 and went on to become the central part of the New Deal's effort to preserve fundamental American institutions. Originally published in 1988. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

How the Other Half Banks

How the Other Half Banks PDF Author: Mehrsa Baradaran
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674495446
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
The United States has two separate banking systems today—one serving the well-to-do and another exploiting everyone else. How the Other Half Banks contributes to the growing conversation on American inequality by highlighting one of its prime causes: unequal credit. Mehrsa Baradaran examines how a significant portion of the population, deserted by banks, is forced to wander through a Wild West of payday lenders and check-cashing services to cover emergency expenses and pay for necessities—all thanks to deregulation that began in the 1970s and continues decades later. “Baradaran argues persuasively that the banking industry, fattened on public subsidies (including too-big-to-fail bailouts), owes low-income families a better deal...How the Other Half Banks is well researched and clearly written...The bankers who fully understand the system are heavily invested in it. Books like this are written for the rest of us.” —Nancy Folbre, New York Times Book Review “How the Other Half Banks tells an important story, one in which we have allowed the profit motives of banks to trump the public interest.” —Lisa J. Servon, American Prospect

The Freedmen's Savings Bank

The Freedmen's Savings Bank PDF Author: Walter Lynwood Fleming
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
About Freedmen's Savings and Trust Company in Washington, D.C.

Bonds Now!

Bonds Now! PDF Author: Marilyn Cohen
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0470937327
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
A money-making formula for navigating the bond market's new rules of fixed income investing The credit meltdown has completely reshaped the market for government bonds, Treasury bonds, T-bills, and high yield bond funds. Investors are flocking to corporate bonds and municipal bonds. Tax advantaged bonds have become the safe haven of choice. But you have to know where to look. Bonds Now! shows you. Bonds Now! offers rare insight into safely investing in fixed income vehicles while maintaining necessary liquidity and meeting yield targets. It doesn't waste a lot of time on the elementary basics, but instead, jumps right in and shows you how to build a safe bond portfolio designed to weather turbulent economic downturns. Discusses how to quickly analyze a bond as well as buy and sell them Examines what it takes to build an impregnable fortress around your bond portfolio Reveals how to develop a sixth sense for trouble and sell your bond position while there's still time There is only one way to guarantee you're getting the right information-get it yourself. Bonds Now! shows you how and where, but even more importantly, this reliable resource clearly explains what to do with it once you have it. This is a knockout formula with proven results. It is the only way to guarantee the bond market won't steal your money. Today's explosive financial environment demands that investors find a safe haven for their money. Using Bonds Now! as your guide, the bond market is that place. Buy this book today and start your own journey to economic recovery.

FDR, an Intimate History

FDR, an Intimate History PDF Author: Nathan Miller
Publisher: Lanham, Md. : Madison Books
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 616

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Book Description
A "truly moving . . ". ("Houston Chronicle") biography of our 32nd president. "Roosevelt is brought to life once again in a clear, concise and well-documented story from beginning to end . . . it is a pleasure".--"Washington Post Book World". "The definitive popular Roosevelt biography"--"Library Journal". *Lightning Print On Demand Title