Freedom Lost, Freedom Won: A Personal History of America

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 two hundred 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.