Watertown author and cultural historian Robin Bernstein’s book “Freeman’s Challenge: The Murder That Shook America’s Original Prison for Profit,” was honored during the Massachusetts Book Awards.
The 25th Annual Massachusetts Book Awards were announced in September, and Bernstein’s book was one of two to receive honors in the Nonfiction category.
Bernstein is a cultural historian who specializes in U.S. racial formation since the 19th Century, and has published four books.
“Freeman’s Challenge“ tells a gripping, morally complicated story of murder, greed, race, and the true origins of prison for profit. The book description on Bernstein’s website reads:
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.
Find out more about “Freeman’s Challenge” here.
The Massachusetts Center for the Book organizes the Massachusetts Book Awards, which recognize significant works of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, translated literature, and children’s/young adult literature written, illustrated, or translated by current Commonwealth residents. Submissions open each Fall and close at the end of the calendar year. The Massachusetts Book Awards Ceremony will be held on October 7th at the Massachusetts State House.