FREEMAN’S CHALLENGE | A Busboys and Poets Books Presentation

“Provocative, robust... Robin Bernstein’s compelling narrative provides insight not only into the institution of the Pr*son in the United States, but also into the lives of those whose newly experienced dreams of freedom were crushed by evolving intersections of punishment and racial capitalism.” — Angela Y. Davis, author of Are Prisons Obsolete?, distinguished professor emerita, University of California, Santa Cruz

In the early nineteenth century, as slavery gradually ended in the North, a village in New York State invented a new form of unfreedom: the profit-driven Pr*son. Uniting incarceration and capitalism, the village of Auburn built a Pr*son that enclosed industrial factories. There, “slaves of the state” were leased to private companies. The prisoners earned no wages, yet they manufactured furniture, animal harnesses, carpets, and combs, which consumers bought throughout the North. Then one young man challenged the system.

In Freeman’s Challenge, Robin Bernstein tells the story of an Afro-Native teenager named William Freeman who was convicted of a horse theft he insisted he did not commit and sentenced to five years of hard labor in Auburn’s Pr*son. Incensed at being forced to work without pay, Freeman demanded wages. His challenge triggered violence: first against him, then by him. Freeman committed a M**der that terrified and bewildered white America. And white America struck back—with aftereffects that reverberate into our lives today in the persistent myth of inherent Black criminality. William Freeman’s unforgettable story reveals how the North invented Pr*son for profit half a century before the Thirteenth Amendment outlawed slavery “except as a punishment for crime”—and how Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and other African Americans invented strategies of resilience and resistance in a city dominated by a citadel of unfreedom.

Through one Black man, his family, and his city, Robin Bernstein tells an explosive, moving story about the entangled origins of Pr*son for profit and anti-Black racism.

Dr. Robin Bernstein is joining us on the Busboys stage to dive deeper into this story about “the progression of racism—of William Freeman’s audacious resistance to this new unfreedom..” (Ibram X. Kendi, author of Stamped from the Beginning, winner of the National Book Award) . Copies of the book will be available for purchase during and after the event, and Dr. Bernstein will be signing following the program.

This event is free and open to all. Our program begins at 6:00 pm, and will be followed by an audience Q&A. Copies of FREEMAN’S CHALLENGE will be available for purchase before and after the event. Please note that this event is in person and will be livestreamed. 

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Robin Bernstein is a cultural historian who specializes in the history of race and racism over the past two centuries. She teaches at Harvard, where she is the Dillon Professor of American History and Professor of African and African American Studies and of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality. She wrote Freeman’s Challenge: The M**der that Shook America’s Original Pr*son for Profit with fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Bernstein’s previous book, Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights, won five awards. She has also written a Jewish feminist children’s book, many prize-winning articles, and op-eds and essays in the New York Times, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and other venues. She recently received the Everett Mendelsohn Excellence in Mentoring Award.

Host or Publisher Busboys and Poets