Freeman’s Challenge: The Murder That Shook America’s Original Prison for Profit

Today’s book is: Freeman’s Challenge: The Murder That Shook America’s Original Prison for Profit (U Chicago Press, 2024), by Dr. Robin Bernstein, which tells the story of a teenager named William Freeman. Convicted of a horse theft he insisted he did not commit, he was sentenced to five years of hard labor in Auburn’s new prison. Uniting incarceration and capitalism, the facility included industrial factories where prisoners worked as “slaves of the state.” They 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. Incensed at being forced to work without pay, William 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 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, Dr. Bernstein tells an explosive, moving story about the entangled origins of prison for profit and anti-Black racism.

Our guest is: Dr. Robin Bernstein, who is an award-winning cultural historian specializing in race and racism from the nineteenth century to the present. She teaches at Harvard University, where she is the Dillon Professor of American History and Professor of African and African American Studies and Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality. 

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, the producer of the Academic Life podcast. She holds a PhD in history, which she uses to explore what stories we tell (and why) and what happens to those we never tell.

Playlist for listeners who wish to learn more:

• Stitching Freedom: Embroidery and Incarceration
• Education Behind the Wall
• Hands Up, Don't Shoot: Researching Racial Injustice
• The Journal of Higher Education in Prison

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