Join historian and Harvard professor Robin Bernstein as she discusses her latest book, Freeman's Challenge: The Murder that Shook America's Original Prison for Profit, with award-winning journalist and Northeastern professor Caleb Gayle. 

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.

Robin Bernstein is the Dillon Professor of American History and Professor of African and African American Studies and of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality and Director of the Program in American Studies at Harvard University. 

Caleb Gayle is an Associate Professor in the School of Journalism with a joint appointment in Africana Studies (CSSH) at Northeastern University. He is an award-winning journalist who writes about the history of race and identity. His books, including We Refuse to Forget: a True Story of Black Creeks, American Identity, and Power, are available through the library. 

Books will be available for purchase and signing.