“It has been the Black man’s cow, but the White mans [sic] milk,” Frederick Douglass wrote of the Freedman’s Savings Bank, mere days after its July 1874 shuttering (p. 217). This evocative assessment doubles as one of the central themes of an unflinching new book by historian Justene Hill Edwards.

In Savings and Trust: The Rise and Betrayal of the Freedman’s Savings Bank, Hill Edwards unpacks the fraught story of the Freedman’s Savings Bank (1865–1874). Driven in equal measure by sincere altruism and condescending paternalism, the Freedman’s Savings Bank was founded by a group of white abolitionists and business elites to support the financial needs of newly emancipated Americans. The institution was one of the few Black-serving banks of the early post-bellum period. Less than a decade after its founding, it would come to destroy approximately 10 percent of Black wealth in the United States in a breathtaking orgy of corruption, inspiring lasting distrust among the Black population it purported to help.

Savings and Trust offers a chronological narrative of the Bank’s inner workings that reads like a procedural thriller: a tick-tock account of the small and large decisions that led to one of the great and most resounding fiascos in American financial history. Hill Edwards advances two main arguments: first, that the Bank’s failure was primarily due to active and escalating malfeasance by the Bank’s Trustees; and second, that the Bank represented an extractive transfer of Black wealth to white elites.

The book’s greatest strengths lie in the abundant primary sources Hill Edwards marshals to dispel the notion that the Bank’s failure might have a benign explanation. In contrast to a literature that has at times equivocated about the root causes of the Freedman’s Savings Bank debacle, Hill Edwards makes it clear that the Bank’s failure was a consequence of intentional, avoidable, and often craven acts. She outlines these actions in great detail, relying chiefly on the correspondence between Bank Trustees and their allies in business and government, alongside the internal administrative records of the Bank itself.

This is perhaps the book’s most impressive contribution: the evidence it uncovers makes it impossible to ignore the extent of racism, criminality, and exploitation at the heart of the Freedman’s Savings Bank disaster. Through these new sources, Hill Edwards tells a shocking story of recklessness, self-dealing, cronyism, and fraud on the part of Bank leadership. She shows how the Trustees used a potentially legitimate concern about the profitability and sustainability of a bank serving a low-income and socioeconomically segregated clientele as pretext to institutionalize their own illegal activities. These crimes were abetted by a U.S. Government whose permissiveness of Trustees and general lack of oversight would help to sink the Freedman’s Savings Bank.

Foremost among the Trustees’ abuses was a series of prolific, illegal, and almost cartoonishly unscrupulous loans that—in violation of the Bank’s original charter, which prohibited lending—siphoned money out of the Bank and into the pockets of Trustees and their business associates, largely white D.C.-area elites. These actions were incompatible with the interests of Black depositors, who sought both a safe place to store money while waiting to afford land, as well as loans for their own ventures—loans which, despite the Bank’s frenzy of lending to its white cronies, were almost never granted.

Hill Edwards lays bare the Trustees’ malfeasance, which Congress failed to stop, and sometimes even facilitated: in 1870, citing profitability concerns, the Trustees sought and received approval from Congress to amend the bank’s charter, allowing them to make loans under strict collateral conditions (conditions which the Trustees nevertheless began violating almost immediately). Meanwhile, federal regulators somehow failed to conduct an examination of the Freedman’s Savings Bank until January 1873, some 8 years into the bank’s existence and a mere 18 months before its closure.

The book raises a number of vital questions where more follow-through would be welcome. To give one example, although the book implicates a lack of government oversight, it never explains how, exactly, the Freedman’s Savings Bank was so thoroughly able to evade regulation—or even basic scrutiny. Was this emblematic of other banks in this period? Of other institutions serving the newly emancipated? This omission is illustrative of the book’s broader failure to firmly contextualize the Bank’s collapse in relation to both the Gilded-Age financial system and America’s waning interest in Reconstruction. Such context might better allow us to identify the systems, institutions, culture, and other factors that allowed this sort of exploitation to flourish. Advancing knowledge here is particularly important to the extent that the Bank’s collapse presages more recent failures of financial regulation, including the rise of predatory finance (both within and outside a racialized context).

Likewise, while the book’s sharp focus on the criminal activity of its Trustees is in many ways a great strength, it also represents a missed opportunity to center the experience of depositors—a perspective that remains sorely missing in the bulk of scholarship on the Freedman’s Savings Bank. For instance, what did Black depositors think of the Bank and its operations? What did they know of the changes to the charter? How many applied for loans? What savings strategies did they use, and what did their transaction patterns look like? What other financial options did they have, and did they utilize them? How did they react to the Bank’s unraveling, both in the short and long term? A further consequence of the strict focus on Bank leadership is that—although these ideas are briefly teased in the conclusion—the book does not trace out the implications of the Freedman’s Savings Bank fiasco for bigger-picture questions of institutional distrust, financial participation, and racial wealth gaps. As a result, there is relatively little discussion of what depositors, or Black Americans more generally, took away from this experience.

A final set of comments may simply reflect my tastes as an economist. For example, the book could benefit (even as a qualitative work) from greater quantification, as well as from more analysis and interpretation. On the latter point, for instance, Hill Edwards could draw fruitful comparisons and contrasts between the practical operating challenges faced by the Freedman’s Savings Bank and those highlighted by Mehrsa Baradaran (The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap. Harvard University Press, 2017) in the context of Black-owned banks of a subsequent era. Indeed, such insights would not only advance scholarly understanding, but also aid in developing effective policies to broaden financial access.

Likewise, I was surprised to see the book declining to leverage new tools (e.g., large-scale data linkage, text and sentiment analysis, etc.), data (e.g., newspapers, passbooks, modern survey data, etc.), and perspectives (e.g., very long time horizons) unavailable to the likes of Carl Osthaus when he wrote his seminal 1976 history of the Freedman’s Savings Bank (Freedmen, Philanthropy, and Fraud: A History of the Freedman’s Savings Bank. University of Illinois Press, 1976), or Walter Fleming before him (The Freedmen’s Savings Bank: A Chapter in the Economic History of the Negro Race. University of North Carolina Press, 1927). While Savings and Trust has value as a more modern retelling of Osthaus, substantive engagement with novel data and methods that have emerged in the intervening half-century—which recent work on the Freedman’s Savings Bank in economics has used to great effect—would help move our understanding forward in new and daring ways (see, e.g., C. Celerier and P. Tak. “Finance, Advertising, and Race.” Review of Financial Studies, Forthcoming; V. Traweek and M. Wardlaw. “Societal Trust and Financial Market Participation: Evidence from the Freedman’s Savings Bank.” Review of Financial Studies, Forthcoming; V. Arthi, G. Richardson, and M. Van Orden. “Traumatic Financial Experiences and Persistent Changes in Financial Behavior: Evidence from the Freedman’s Savings Bank.” NBER Working Paper No. 32576, 2024; X. Fu. Life Cycle and Intergenerational Effects of Income and Wealth. UCLA, 2021; and L. Stein and C. Yannelis. “The Impact of Financial Inclusion on Minorities: Evidence from the Freedman’s Savings Bank.” Review of Financial Studies, 33, no. 11 [2020]: 5333–377).

Despite these quibbles, Savings and Trust is engaging and accessible, with much to offer popular and academic audiences alike. It challenges our inclination either to minimize the role of bad actors and bad systems as we struggle with uncomfortable historical realities, or to cast about for alternative and less damning explanations. Sometimes, Hill Edwards seems to suggest, it really is that simple.