Freedom Lost, Freedom Won : A Personal History of America

Pulitzer Prizewinning former Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson tells our nations torturous racial history through his own familys story, starting with his great-grandfathers freedom from slavery and threading his way to his own narrative and reaching todays 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 Robinsons 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 two hundred years of our nations history through the eyes of the remarkable family that Harry founded. Assigned a formal nameHenry Fordhamand 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 peopleonly 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-grandfathers achievement in becoming a free person of color before emancipation to his great-grandfathers Reconstruction-era success, from his fathers 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 countrys tortuous racial history through Robinsons familys story of struggle and survival, pushing us to consider how far the nation has comewillingly or notand how far it still has to go.