Join us for an afternoon discussion of the book Freeman’s Challenge: The Murder that Shook America’s Original Prison for Profit by Professor Robin Bernstein. Professor Bernstein will be in conversation with Lorrie Kim. 

Sunday, June 2nd 3pm at A Novel Idea 

Ticket Options!

1. 1 Copy of Freeman's Challenge ($27.50)

2. Suggested $5 Donation

3. Free Admission (does not guarantee copies of the book will be available at the event)

About the Book

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. 

About the Speakers

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 at Harvard University. She is the author of Freeman’s Challenge: The Murder that Shook America’s Original Prison for Profit (University of Chicago Press, 2024) and Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from slavery to Civil Rights (NYU Press, 2011), which won five prizes.

Lorrie Kim writes pop-culture and literary criticism, often with a focus on intersectional feminism, LGBTQ+ rights, and inclusive literature. She co-hosts the weekly podcast Harry Potter After 2020 with Lorrie Kim and JC. She is a columnist for MuggleNet, a frequent speaker at Harry Potter academic conferences, an organizing team member for MISTI-Con 2023, and a regular contributor to fandom podcasts. Her articles have appeared in Outsports, the Advocate, and the Philadelphia Gay News.