I received a free copy of this book in exchanger for a far and honest review. All opinions are my own.

Author Robin Bernstein shares the shocking origins of prison for profit and anti-Black racism in the book Freeman’s Challenge: The Murder That Shook America’s Original Prison for Profit”.

The Synopsis

An award-winning historian tells a gripping, morally complicated story of murder, greed, race, and the true origins of prison for profit.

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 prison. Uniting incarceration and capitalism, the village of Auburn built a prison 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 prison. Incensed at being forced to work without pay, Freeman demanded wages. His challenge triggered violence: first against him, then by him. Freeman committed a murder 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 prison 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, Bernstein tells an explosive, moving story about the entangled origins of prison for profit and anti-Black racism.

The Review

The shocking nature not only of the crime but of what drove the young African-American man to that crime instantly grabs the reader’s attention. The visceral nature of the life of William Freeman and the heartbreaking events that led to the young man’s incarceration, both the first and second time, was instantly haunting and compelling all at once and captured the sense of frenzy that overtook white America at the time.

The close examination of racial tension and racial profiling during this time was conveyed throughout this book. Not only did the author explore the mindsets that many white Americans took at this time, relegating all members of the Black community to either being savage criminals or a failure of white America to educate the Black community, but showed how these two equally troubling mindsets impacted race relations in the centuries since. The fallout and impact this case had on the treatment and hardship that many Black Americans would feel in the next several years and beyond was shocking yet expertly navigated throughout this book.

The Verdict

Insightful, honest, and engaging author Robin Bernstein’s “Freeman’s Challenge” is a thoughtful and emotional book that examines one man’s heartbreaking case and the terrible reality of how relations between white and black America progressed in the years that followed. The tragic events that occurred to this young man and the conversation this book will spark and get people of all races thinking critically about American history and how we must end the cycle before it begins again made this one book you won’t be able to put down. If you haven’t yet, be sure to grab your copy today!

Rating: 10/10

About the Author

I am a cultural historian who specializes in race in the U.S. from the nineteenth century to the present. A graduate of Yale’s doctoral program in American Studies, I am the Dillon Professor of American History and Professor of African and African American Studies and of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University. I am also Chair of Harvard’s doctoral program in American Studies. My book Freeman’s Challenge: The Murder that Shook America’s Original Prison for Profit is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press in May 2024. My previous book, Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights, won five awards.

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