On July 2, 1874, a bank closed its doors.  The 61,144 depositors, many of whom poured their life’s savings into this financial institution, collectively lost almost $3 million.  In the nineteenth century, a single bank failure did not typically garner national attention.  However, this bank was no ordinary financial institution.  It served a particularly vulnerable population of people: African Americans recently freed from slavery.  The bank that closed was the Freedman’s Savings and Trust Company, also known as the Freedman’s Bank.  It was a private financial institution founded by white bankers and philanthropists at the end of the Civil War to introduce formerly enslaved people to the basic tenets of American banking. When it failed in 1874, its Black depositors lost access to the hard-earned savings that would have helped their climb out of slavery.  They also lost faith in the promise of banking to build wealth and economic security.

This event is part of the Denbo Center for Humanities & the Arts' 2025-26 Distinguished Lecture Series. 

Justene Hill Edwards is an associate professor of history at the University of Virginia. She is a specialist in African American history and her research examines Black economic life in America. She is the author of Savings and Trust: The Rise and Betrayal of the Freedman’s Bank and Unfree Markets: The Slaves’ Economy and the Rise of Capitalism in South Carolina. She has won numerous fellowships and awards, most recently the Andrew Carnegie Fellowship and the Mellon New Directions Fellowship. She received her B.A. from Swarthmore College, M.A. from Florida International University, and Ph.D. from Princeton University.