Freedom Lost, Freedom Won: A Personal History of America
Eugene Robinson
Simon & Schuster
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 200 years of our nation’s history through the eyes of the remarkable family that Harry founded, telling our country’s tortuous racial history through Robinson’s family’s story of struggle and survival and pushing us to consider how far the nation has come—willingly or not—and how far it still has to go.