it's tonight. we are honored to help launch a brand new book, in fact, a book that will be officially released on may 1st by an author who has been part of our american antiquarian society community for many years. 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's the author of racial innocence, performing american childhood from slavery to civil rights, which won five awards include doing best book prizes from the new england american

studies association, the association for theater and higher education and the international research society in children's literature. for her first book, robin held a jay and deborah last fellowship here at a in 2008 2009. i will also add that professor bernstein has been a crucial advisor to acs current and e.h. grant historic children's voices after robin bernstein talks for a bit. she'll be joined in converse nation by kevin quashie, who is the royce family professor of teaching excellence in english at brown university. he's the author or editor of four books. most recently, the sovereignty of quiet and beyond resistance in black culture and black aliveness or a poetics poetics of being black aliveness has been awarded to prizes. the james russell lowell prize from the modern languages

association and the pegasus award for poetry criticism from the poetry foundation. so we are honored and pleased to welcome both robert robin bernstein and kevin quashie yee here with us this evening. and i'm delighted to turn the podium over to robin bernstein. welcome. thank you all so much. i am so thrilled to be here. thank you all for coming out tonight on this beautiful day. thank you. thank you, scott casper, for that lovely introduction. thank you. dan wolverton and stephanie corrigan for making this event possible. i think tied poor bookshop for supplying books for tonight's event. and i also want to thank c-span for sharing this conversation with their viewers on american history tv. i thank the american antiquarian society writ large, which has been one of my most important

intellectual homes since i had that fellowship here in 2008 to 2009. and that i was here for only one month and the month was completely transformative. it simply transformed my first book, racial innocence performing american childhood from slavery to civil rights. the expertise and generosity of the staff. the astounding resources and the camaraderie of the other fellows all enabled me to write a book that i could not have imagined otherwise. so many thanks. i also thank professor kevin quashie, who has generously joined me in conversation tonight. kevin has thanked, as has shaped my thinking since 2012 when he published his luminous book, the sovereignty of quiet beyond resistance in black culture in 2018. i came to brown to share early work from what would become freeman's challenge. kevin responded with thoughts and questions.

that pushed me to think in new ways about william freeman and his family being in conversation with kevin tonight feels like a gift and a homecoming. thank you, kevin quashie. i began writing freeman's challenge because of two moments of surprise as the first surprise happened when by chance i found a footnote about a theatrical staging of a black on white murder. and this was in 1846 in the city of auburn, which is in the central new york state, in the finger lakes region. i was astounded and here's why. my fields of expertise include american racial formation and theater and performance history. so what i knew from both of these fields was that in the mid-19th century, white people absolutely did not want to see any representations of black on white violence on stage. it was too terrifying. it was to disturbing.

it could not be contained within the framework of entertainment. and so for that reason, it simply wasn't present on the american stage. and i'll give you an example to show you how not present it was when people performed othello. othe course, contains a scene of black on white violence, and people would bend over backwards, turn themselves into pretzels to avoid showing that. and one of the things that they would do, white performers would perform the role of othello as an oriental ized character, as swarthy and as distinctly not american and certainly not african-american. so this is how much white people did not want to see these images on on stage. so when i found this footnote, i knew that something very strange had happened to make white people behave in a way that was so different from other white

people at the same time. so what? i asked was, what happened in auburn in 1846 to cause such unusual, such unexposed, acted behavior? so i started researching the crime that was the subject of the theatrical performance, and i started with the man who is at the center of it, whose name was william freeman. this is william freeman. i quickly learned that william freeman was an afro native teenager who was cvied in 1840 of a horst that he swore he didn't commit despite a lack oence. he was he waenced. to five years in the auburnced state prison. the auburn state prison was distinctive beca enclosed factories where prison prisoners were least two. private companies usually for $0.30 a day. the prison pocketed all of this money. the prisoners received no cut

william freeman was forced to manufacture animal harnesses, to dye silk and to make carpets. these goods were sold throughout new york state to consumers. and this was my second surprise. i thought convict leasing in new york in the 1840s in factories is like many people associated convict leasing with the post-civil war south and also with agricultural labor. i was familiar with important works like michelle alexander's, the new jim crow and douglas blackmon's slavery by another name, and these books along with ava duvernay's film 13th, suggest that profit driven carceral practices began with the civil war. after the civil war, with the end of southern slavery and the passing of the 13th amendment, which famously states that neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall exist in the united states, except as a

punishment for crime. but in fact, convict leasing existed in the north decades before the civil war. it developed in the context of northern, not southern slavery, the end of northern, not southern slavery and the auburn state prison where william freeman was incarcerated, developed this practice. so this project began with two surprises. and when i took these two surprises in a question emerged, which was did these surprises have any relationship to each other? was did the practice of convict labor in the auburn state prison somehow lead to white people behaving in auburn in such an unusual way to figure out the answer to this question. i wrote freeman's challenge the murder that shook america's original prison for profit. so who was william freeman? william freeman grew up in

auburn, in the black neighborhood of new guinea. he was born in 1824 into auburn's most prominent black family. his enslaved grandpartsere revered as the founders of the duke of new guinea. william freeman ewp ia close knit, lively social world, organized around private gaergs, church anti-slavery action, home based education and work. but alongside william freeman near new guinea, something else was growing. and that was the auburn state prison. the auburn state prison was international, really famous because it innovated a novel form of incarceration. unlike other prisons at the time, the auburn prison was not established primarily to punish or to confine or to redeem people. rather, it was built by white businessmen for the explicit purpose of stimulating economic development. the building of this prison in

1816 caused $20,000 in state funding immediately to flow into auburn. and at the time, auburn was a tiny little village with fewer than 2000 people. and $20,000 is the equivalent of half a million dollars in today's money. so you can imagine if you have a tiny little village with 2000 people and all of a sudden you have what is now half a million dollars flowing in, it is going to transform everything. and that is exactly what happened. the builders go, this was the plan from the beginning. the builders goal had nothing to do with justice or reform. their goal was to transform auburn from a village into a city, and that and that is what happened. the business was the excuse me, the prison, the business. the prison that was a business was built on the banks of the west go outlet. so you can see right here this river, t the alaska outlet. and it was built on the banks of the alaska outlet for the explicit purpose of powering

factories. so even before the pris but, it was imagined to enclose factories for the purpose ofacturing goods. the deed this land here was sold to the state for $1 and the deed actual state a d will be built. and you can see the dam right there. a dam would be built in oo to power thetories inside the prison and also to power the private businesses of the men who sold this land for a dollar. so they the people who created this prison, viewed the prison as a vehicle by which to soak up state funds, manufacture goods, stimulate commerce, build banking, and develop land and waterways. in short, they reimagined the prison as an infrastructure for capital ism. this economic plan was supported by what became known as the auburn system of incarceration. so the auburn system, a system

of incarceration, has a number of characteristics. one is that the auburn system, the prison, ran through a system of extreme social isolation. the men who were imprisoned in auburn were put into solitary confinement every single night. and during the day they worked in factories. they worked together in these factories, but they were not allowed to speak to each other at all, ever. and they were not even allowed to look at each other's faces at all, ever. so this was an extreme social isolation. people could go in auburn, literally for years without speaking a word and without looking at another human face. of course, people did find ways to communicate. of course, people did find ways to look at each other's faces. but that was extremely risky

because another characteristic of auburn, another characteristics of the auburn system was extreme physical violence. so this and the violence was necessary to enforce the extreme social isolation. and because this is inhumane, this is unhuman. so there was solitary confinement every night, total silence at every time, at all times, and work in factories. and what's really important to understand is that the purpose of the social isolation, the purpose of the silence was productivity. the goal was to increase productivity. and the concept behind the isolation was not punishment. the concept was how to control people and get them to work as much as possible. and that was the concept behind the extreme violence as well. so the auburn system is widely known to scholars of u.s. prison

history. and one of the key ideas that i hope comes through in my book is to foreground what the system was for that. it was a system that relied on torture. it was a system that relied on inhumane practices, all for the purpose of manufacturing, all for the purpose of making money. and it absolutely worked. so here is what the prison looked like from the outside and you can see it looks like a giant facry because that's basically what it was. and i want to point out just a couple of aspects of this. first of all, everywhere you see a smokestack that's marking the location of a factory. so you can count the smokestacks and you know exactly how many factories there werin the prison. and these were all prison factories that were run by private compaes leasing prisoners. the other thing i want to point out about this images the locomotive in the bottom left hand corner.

so the train tracks actuly grew in relation to the prison. they were bringing rita ariel to the prison. they were taking goods away from the prison. they were also bringing tourists to and from the prison. the prison was actually making addition money thrgh tourism, believe it or not. and that's something i can talk about more later. and the last thing i want to point out about that train, besides the way it marks the infrastructure of capitalism, is that locomotives were actually built inside the prison. locomotives were one of the one of the salable commodities is that were actually built by prisoners in the auburn state prison. so i'd like to share a slice of friedman's daily experience in the prison. one of the things that's important to know is that the extreme size, social isolation and was designed to reduce

workers, men to machines. and that was actually the language that was used that the that the prisoners should be like machines. and it was all designed to dehumanize and to maximize, to maximize productivity. so i'm going to show you i'm going to share with you a little bit of the daily routine that made that happen. every morning, freeman and the other men marched into the prison yard. they emptied their their light tubs, which were to u as a bathroom into the underground tank. rinse them with pumped pump water and set them aside. then they rejoined the lock step. this is the lock step. 's a form of marching very closely, and it's designed to prevent men from talking to each other or from seeing each other's faces. they rejoined the lock step and marched through factories producedarpets, clothes, barrels, furniture and more with each chamber gering a different racket, a different

shade of smoke as raw material began to sld or boil, as men peeled off to assume their workstations. the line dwindled. the last stop was freeman's the game shop. there, amidst gusts of dust, 72 men madenil harnesses and hardware for carriages in 1841, which was william freeman first year. there freeman and others almost built almost 7000nil harnesses, plus hundreds of saddles, stirrups and related items. their work was sold wholesale oil at a total market value of almost $32,000. the contractor bought the year's labor from the prison for a fifth. that amount just over $7,000. less than $0.35 per man per day. freeman's job was to file rough iron that had been imported from england. smoothing it in preparation for a lacquered finish called japan,

running alongside nine other filers, he burnished the surfaces of buckles, rings and other hardware for saddles. freeman filed every morning for 2 hours, then marched to the mess hall for a half hour breakfast, marched back, filed more, marched, ate dinner, marched. filed every movement regimented every day, the same. another prisoner described this life, quote. each morning, when i seated myself in the shop and cast a look around me upon things, two familiar with my sight, my impression has been accompanied with a sigh. i am here yet. freeman resisted his forced labor from the start and he resisted in a lot of different ways. he resisted by working as little as possible. he resisted by reducing his productivity. and he reduced he resisted by clowning around, which came with enormous physical risks. he he made other people laugh.

and this was a very risky but very humanizing thing to do. and he also risked. he also resisted by telling the guards point blank that he did not want to work. he wanted to. he felt that it was unfair that he was being forced to work, as he put it, for nothing. he demanded wages. his claim was simple, but it challenged auburn's defense pinning idea. he insisted that he was not a machine, not a slave, but instead a citizen with rights, a worker. upon his release from prison, he pursued his claim through legal means. he appealed to magistrates who mocked and dismissed him. and then william freeman turned to violence. william freeman committed a quadruple murder that terrified and bewildered white urbanites. a high a high profile trial ensued, and the trial got very

big, very fast. and it got it. it made national headlines. and one of the reasons that it got so big so fast was that william henry seward, who was then best known as the governor of recent governor of new york, defended freeman pro bono. and, of course, we know that 20 years later, after this, william henry seward would become the secretary of state to abraham lincoln and he would broker the sale of alaska. if you've ever heard of seward's folly. that's him. that was in the future, however. the prosecutor was john van buren, who was the son of the recent president. martin van buren. so this was a clash of the titans, and it got very big, very fast. and the there were daily transcripts of the trial, went out daily on telegraph, and they got published far and wide. the trial attracted the commentary of walt whitman, james mccune smith, horace greeley, a lot of very

well-known people commented on it. now, freeman was entirely clear about why he killed he wanted back pay, and if he couldn't have it, he would have payback. but no one, the prosecution or the defense, wanted to hear freeman's challenge to the auburn system, because the auburn system was the engine behind auburn's prosperity. and by this point, the auburn system, the auburn state prison, was actually a major engine behind new york's prosperity. it was also a major player in party politics. so the prison was very important to a lot of different people, and nobody wanted to hear that it was wrong to make people work for no pay. so nobody wanted to hear it. white auburn ites, particularly, did not want to hear it. so what they did to not hear this very clear critique that they could not hear what they did, instead was they invented

their own story. they invented their own stories in order to drown out what freeman was actually saying. they could not hear the in their effort to silence freeman's critique of profit driven incarceration, white people developed two stories, which were both racist libels that were then relatively novel. the first libel that they developed in order to drown out freeman's challenge to the prison was what would later be called the black, quote unquote, social pathology model. and this was became a century and a half a century to and 2012 decades later became really important to the moynihan report. so they are so seward argued that freeman killed because of of what would then become called social pathology. the other libel was created by the prosecution, and that was the libel of, quote unquote, innate black criminality.

and that was the story that was told in the theatrical performance that was in that footnote that i found that surprised me. so much. white people in auburn wanted so urgently to deny freeman's challenge to the prison that they would actually rather see black on white violence, then hear that challenge. they were using the disturbing image of black on white violence as a distract action from something that they found even more disturbing, even more threatening, which was what william freeman was saying about the prison in their midst. these paired libels were amplified and disseminated in stories about freeman theater, literature, visual images, and above all, the press. and then, of course, black people had to figure out ways to live with these emerging young,

racist ideas. they forged many strategies, including what kevin quashie calls quiet. and i hope this is something that we can talk about in a few minutes. william freeman story is not over. today, we all live with the racist ideas that incubated in his trial and the auburn state prison itself still exists. it is now known as the auburn correctional facility. it is the oldest continuously operating maximum security prison in the united states and manufaurring continues to define it. today, all new york state license plates are manufactured in the auburn coectional city. so the people who manufacture your new yorstate license plates, they are literally walking in. william freeman's footsteps. so freeman's story is not over, but a portion of it actually might end literally in the next five weeks.

there is a bill that is up to the need for the new york state legislature, and it's coming up in may. and there are there's two bills that are coming up. one is called the no slavery in new york act. and i realize that using slavery to refer to forc carceral labois controversial thing. and that's something that we can talk about. but that is what this bill is called. and what this bill does is it it says it basically says th n one will be forced to work in a prison in new york state or in any carceral institution in new york state. it ds not take awalar. it does not take away the opportunity to work for people who want to. what it does simply is it takes away the possibility of being forced to work, which is exactly what william freeman objected to. then there's a second bill, which is called the fairness and opportunity act for a fair fairness and opportunity for incarcerated workers. and this bill addresses the second part of friedman's

critique. freeman wanted not only to be not forced to work, he wanted an opportunity to build a life for himself. so when he wanted wages, he wanted not only wages, but everything that wages confer. he wanted economic stability, dignity, justice. he wanted self-definition as as a free man. his name itself. so this second bill addresses that part of freeman's challenge that he wanted dignity in his work. he wanted wages that could enable him to build a life. these two bills before the new york state are before the new york state legislature right now. and what they are doing is they are delivering william freeman's message into the 21st century. it is time to listen and to act. so i ask you to consider going to 13th forward is a wonderful organization that is leading the the the the charge to pass these

two bills go to 13th forward. find out how you can support these bill and together we can finally end forced labor in prisons in new york state. thank you. how are you? i'm great. thank you so much for being here. yeah, it is an honor to be here with you. thank you. i hope everyone's well and safe. thank you so much for that introduction. i'll say just briefly that on this is such a magisterial book and by that i mean the musician david crosby was famous for saying that he loved things that were better made than they had to be. and what you've done in this book is taken a really comp

fixated story in the way that perhaps every story about race in america is complicated because of our compounded in capacities of facing the thing. and you've just found a narrative way of trying to to witness what is difficult. so what would an incredible, incredible book. and i'm so glad that it's here. i'm so glad that people will get to experience it. congratulations. thank you. it's a gift. it's a gift to all of us. so you said in as you were speaking, you said you mentioned the kind of isolation and the one could even think of the kind of metaphor of silences that reverberate across the story, not just in the prison, in terms of freeman's. freeman's what he's able to say about what he did, what people are able to hear and not willing

to hear and maybe not willing to understand. could we talk a little bit more about how you as you're doing the research for this book, how were you thinking about how voice and expressiveness is operating across the story? yeah. thank you so much for that question and thank you so much for being here. it is such an honor to be in conversation with you. i have learned so much from kevin quashie and i'm so grateful to him for being here. one of the there were there were two prime directives as i was researching, there were two things that i was always trying to do. one was to hear william freeman voice. i was always trying to find his voice. he never he he never wrote. he never wrote anything. he never wrote out his story. he also did not testify at any of his trials. so everything that we have from him is filtered through people

who heard him speak and it was it was a lot of white people, but it was also a lot of black people, a lot of people in his family said what he what they heard. now, of course, every single one of those people was biased. every single one of those people had an agenda. and so there were reasons to to to not simply on a literal level, believe any one story about what freeman said, but the way i sought to hear him was by listening across the stories. so if many people who were all describing the same set of events, if they all said things that that echoed each other and harmonize with each other, it seemed likely that it was true. so i was so the first the first the first directive was always, listen for the voice and not just of freeman, but of his family. so freeman had a really interesting family and i learned a lot about them. but most of them did not leave

written records. so i was always trying to to find what they their perspective, what they had to say about themselves and a really profound moment in the research. i was thinking, if only they had written. and then i thought, well, they did write. they had to have written in various ways. i just need to find the writing. i just need to find the to find it in the right way. and one day i realized that the name the name that the family chose for themselves, the surname, because when when william freeman man's grandparents became free, they could have named themselves anything they could have named themselves after their former enslaver. lots of people did that, but they didn't. they chose to name themselves freeman. and i realized that their that's their autobiography. it's an autobiography in one word. freeman. that's what they wrote. and that's the most important thing that i can hear. so. so that was one prime directive. but then the other.

the other prime directive was to try to infer as little as possible. i don't have access to william freeman's interior already. i don't have access to his psyche. and i never wanted to overestimate my access to who he was on the deepest level. so my second prime directive was always to focus on what he did, what he experienced, what i know. he experienced it every moment when i was writing this, i was asking myself at this moment in the story, what did freeman see at this moment? in the story? what could freeman hear or not hear? because he was at one point beaten. so badly while he was in prison that he actually became deafened. so what could he hear? what could he not hear? what could he see? what could he smell? what could he touch? and what did he say? so these were all the ways that i was trying to deal with

silence. i was trying to find what i could find and go no further, not infer things that i didn't actually have evidence for. i tried to really let some silences just be silences. that that's actually why the strength of the project, i think because there are those moments where repeatedly. freeman and tell me if i get this correctly, freeman says repeatedly, two things in as people asking him questions, why did you do this? he or a saying things to him about the trial. he says, i don't know. and there are moments where you you write that i don't know because pressured partly by he's deafened and so it might be that he can't hear everything that people are saying to him. people might not be sensitive to needing to project or to speak

or communicate in a way it might be something else. and i'd love for you to talk about that. i don't know. and that is balanced by the fact that he's clear that when he's asked, you know, the moment i'm talking about when he's asked who made you this way? what made you this way? yeah and he says he says the state he believes absolutely explicit, that his real target is the state. he he could not have been clearer about what his critique was, why he did what he did. and people just could not hear. and it was mostly white people, but not only people who just did not want to hear his challenge to the system that was making them prosperous. yeah, that's such a incredible balance between a person who at one's declines or refuses or, you know, whether it's performative, a genuine who says, i don't know when being interrogated and the question is

so singular or yeah, that he is unwavering in terms of saying the state. yeah. so he, he did he sometimes said i don't know when what i suspect is that he could not hear. yes, but i don't know that that's that's speculation. he also he was very good at at refusing to answer questions he didn't want to answer. so at one point he when he is captured and he is interrogated, at a certain point he just clams up. he he decides, i'm not going to answer any more questions. and he uses silence. and this is after he had been released from the auburn state prison. he had been living with five years of enforced silence. and then he he is arrested for this act of violence and he is interrogated and by this point, he knows the power of silence. he knows how powerful it is.

and he answer some questions. and then he decides he's done and he says, i'm not going to answer any more questions. so he was somebody who is absolutely able to use silence and use it in a very strategic way. and it's such a great response, right? because part of his saying the state made me this way is not only the way in which maybe related to the way he uses silence, but the way he manufactured the weapons that he used for the murder. there is he picked some of that up from being in the prison also. and so the there just these part of the book is this like laying bare to the lie of prisons as a site of rehabilitation. oh yeah. and and the way in which you use his case as an exemplar of of of that lie. yeah. it's really terrific. could we talk about there's a moment, both in your presentation today and in the

book chapter, where you think about people wanting to know, why did you do this? can you talk a little bit about you talk about why and how in the book and maybe even what could you say a little bit about that as it relates to the complexity of this case? yeah. so freeman story has been told in some ways for almost 200 years. he's best remembered william henry seward defended him using the insanity defense. and it was not the first use of the insanity defense in the united states, but it was one of the first. so this was extremely novel and freeman's case actually set some precedent for the use of the insanity defense in new york state. so freeman's case is very when it's when it's has been written about very often it's been written about in the context of the insanity defense. it's been written about in the context of legal history. and the reason that the insanity

defense is so important is that it answers the question of why. why did he kill? it answers question in a way that was very comforting. it's a it's if if what you if you are if you're if your livelihood is dependent on the prison and the prison has been challenged, it is very comforting to hear that the person who committed this act of violence is simply irrational in every possible way which is what seward was arguing. so, so story has been has been brought forward as as a why kind of story. what everybody wanted to know in the moment. and this infiltrated into the storytelling over decades was why did he kill? he told us why he told us why. and there was no mystery. so one of the things that i did in the book was to say the real mystery is why people kept asking why the real mystery is

why they couldn't. the answer that was so clear repeated very straightforward. why they keep asking why? and that to me, that was the meat of this of the second half of the book, how people got so psychologically invested in specific explanation lines for the crime when the real story, the real explanation was right there on the table. so i so i kind of i flipped the switch in the part of the book that you're referring to, we go from, you know, why did he kill? which was the question that everybody has been asking for 170 years to why do we keep asking this question? and when they you asked about the what also when when people could not hear the why, freeman gave them over and over. they said they just the more the more they couldn't hear it, the

more they had to ask the question again and again. and then they started moving to questions of what? and the way you put it earlier in our conversation earlier was what was he was he, quote unquote, a lunatic? was he quote unquote, you know, innately violent? what was he? these were more ways of avoiding hearing what freeman was actually saying. part of what you do to in the project related to this incapacity to hear, it's really like a practice of not hearing which really is part of the book is really a confrontation with our incubus city to to witness and to stay with james baldwin always talks about we must try to bear it and and part of the american logic might be that we're not very good at trying to bear it. you walk through walk us through just his diligence when he gets out of prison in terms of which

first trying to get recompense is that he goes to magistrates, he goes to try and get a haircut to clean up he goes to try and get a job as a farmhand. so there's this real for a person who comes out of prison and is disorient that in all of the ways having spent went in that was it 1515 right it comes out five years later the town has changed. he's lost most of his and yet he has this kind of deliberateness about trying to build life as a citizen, as compere located as that word can be, he's trying to do right by being a citizen and one of the axis to say i want to be paid for my labor. and he goes through all of these process, these. and so it's amazing in the book to have you juxtapose that diligence against this larger racist narrative of it's either it's craziness, some manifestation of that really terrible idea that black people are somehow subhuman and less

than human, not human animal. so i think that there's there's this across the project is this insistence on our incapacity to to bear the the answer that there is no answer to why the answer is the state. he told us it's the state. how do we live with that? could we talk then about can you say something about what we're. what were the responses from his family and from the black community? because that's another part of the complexity of the story. and again, i'll say in this forum, for anyone listening online, part of what i think is the accomplishment of the book is how you really balance so beautifully a difficult story to tell. not difficult because of not difficult only because of the violence at the heart of it, but difficult because of how complicated the interlocking

parts of it are. say something about his family's response to black community's response. yeah, well, to answer your question, i'll go to an essay by angela davis. so, angela wrote this essay that was very helpful for me in writing this book where she lamented the fact that frederick douglass did not take up the beginnings of convict labor as a major cause. frederick douglass did have a little bit to say about prisons, but not that much. and angela davis basically this essay wishing that he had taken it up as a major cause when convict labor practices were in their infancy, by which she meant the hope. the post post-civil war. and she was to the south. but where we when we understand that actually convict labor began in new york state which was where douglass was living

the fact that he never took it up is all the more astonishing. if we are thinking from our perspective. so one of the things that i'm doing in this book is really answering this question why was it not a major a major rallying cry for a amazing people, brilliant geniuses like frederick douglass, also harriet tubman, who lived in auburn. she lived in auburn to miles away from the auburn state prison for the second half of her life, from the 1850s, through her her passing in 1913. so why why wasn't there more organizing against the prison? and in answer to your question about his family, his family loved him. his family really loved him. and that was really clear. and they some members of the family testified for it on his behalf in court, which was an extremely brave thing to do. and some of them suffered

enormous white retribution for their testimony. so i want to really honor their courage in testifying on behalf of william freeman. so some of them did that and and since then, some of them didn't. some of the members of his family and his community had difficulty hearing his challenge for some of the same reasons that the white people did, which was that they were also part of an economic system. they were also embedded in auburn. but the other reason was that, of course, they weren't clairvoyant. so why did why did frederick douglass not rise up against the beginnings of convict labor? one really important answer is that there was no way to know from the perspective of especially the mid-19th century, what convict labor was going to turn into. there was no way to know that. there was no way to imagine mass

racialized incarceration when black people were disproportionately incarcerated in the auburn state prison during freeman's lifetime. but actual numbers were very small or were relatively small, and there were people who were upset about it at the time, and there were people who were critiquing that at the time. but there was no way to imagine hundred and 50 years into the future, with mass racialized in conservation. so that's so so that that absence of clairvoyance on anybody's part. i'm certainly not clairvoyant and they weren't either that they were embedded in their own moment and they were embedded in the same rising capitalism, the same economic structures as everybody else. so his is family and his community was very mixed. but but i think what i just want to end with is that the women in his family in particular rallied behind him. his mother rallied behind him,

and his sister in law, who was his closest friend, rallied behind him. his sister in law, deborah depew. she testified, on his behalf in court and she had a very hard time doing that, but she did it. it's i'm so glad you mentioned both his mother and his sister in law, because they they both expressed this incredible care. they also suffered mightily for it. i'd also say that indeed, when you talk about his family's care for him, there's this moment in the book where you talk about, of course, after he's committed these murders, the white almost in a kind of frothy mob state. right. and both wanted to know why he did it, but also wanting to enact extralegal justice against him and his family members want to know how he is and how he's being treated.

and so there's that that even with the complete city you just described as that incredible tenderness then that i'm grateful to have in the book. and if i can, to. when you were talking, one of things you showcase in the book is that people in the black community were advocating for the things they were advocate for, for schools and for voting rights and you said this thing, which i hadn't thought of before, because i'm not a historian of of this era, but you say the thing that i think is really worth highlighting that for for a black activist in new york in the 1820s and thirties and forties they were imagined the opportunity to be able to defend oneself before a jury would have been a kind of incredible acquisition of citizenship, such that the prison being against the prison would neces certainly seem to be

high on their list because they were actually trying to think about the opportunity to actually be like be able to defend oneself, which would be the next step in accruing rights. and so these are complicated, complicated landscapes. yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. and i'm glad that you brought up of the question of what was important to black communities when they if they were not rallying against this this nascent convict labor. what was important to them and it's exactly what you just said. they were they were rallying around voting. they were rallying around the rights of citizenship, including the right to a fair trial. they were rallying around their own economic development. they were rallying against southern slavery because of course, this was all in the wake of northern slavery. this was after the end of northern slavery very recently, after the end of northern slavery. they were organizing against southern slavery. so and they were they were organizing their communities. they were building churches.

they were creating social constructs. they were doing all these really important things. and when you when you think about the urgency in the moment of all of these political projects, we can understand better why, why, why convict leasing seemed not as important at the time, except it was really important to william freeman and he was raising this this challenge. and we should understand him in that way as as somewhat prescient. you know, he he he was not imagining the future. he was making this very simple claim. and i think it's power or it was actually in its simplicity. he kept saying that he wanted wages for his work. he never even said, i want the prison to close. he never said the prison. this prison system is inherently wrong and it should be abolished. he never said that. he never even said, i want other

people to be paid. he just wanted his pay that he deserved for his work and that is a very narrow claim. and i think a lot of its force actually derived from the fact that it was so narrow and so undeniable. how can you look somebody in the eye and say, no, you don't deserve wages for your five years of labor? so the force was actually in this the narrowness of the claim, beautifully said. let's we have a couple of minutes. let's see if there are questions in the audience. people want to ask questions? i could talk all night with you, but. and thank you for waiting until the microphones make their way around. should i stand? you know. oh, that's okay. i want them to thank you so much

for that talk. i the book sounds awesome and i think it's really important that you're not only bringing the story of convict leasing it to the north and before the civil war, but also really the way that black pathologizing or the pathologizing of black criminality was a story of that predate it that's not just the 20th century but also the civil war. i think it's really important work. i did have a question, a more context driven question. you kind of alluded to this in your in your talk. and i'm sure in the book it gets deeper treatment. but, you know, auburn, the penitentiary, was at the center of this kind of national and transatlantic conversation about prison reform. and you kind of were highlighting, i don't know if it was tension with the profit driven component of the of the

prison, but one of the one of the things that i was curious about while you were talking about the fact that auburn was essentially a factory or at least a series of factories, was its relationship to other penitentiaries in in the north as well as the south. regard guarding the economic functions of it. because other, you know, was this system i mean, beyond the disciplinary component, was this economic system also being exported to other places? i know that like i've done work on maryland, i know that they also had profit driven so was the would you describe those other prison systems as that as being convict leasing, as well? or like how does it work? yeah, absolutely. i'm so glad you asked that. thank you so much for that. yes. so the auburn system was very exported and imitated and duplicated. so it was duplicated almost instantly. and exported across the north,

across the united states, across the ocean, to europe. so these other prisons that had similar similar goals, similar economic goals, similar structures, they were all imitating auburn. so i'll give you just a simple a single example. san quentin was duke was built on the auburn model and this was completely explicit, absolutely deliberate. one of the reasons they were tourists at the auburn state prison was people were so interested in this system and interested in replicating it. so there were there were private tourists who just came to gawk, but there were also many, many official envoys. so to tocqueville came to auburn and harriet martineau came to auburn. so there were many people who were coming in order to assess the system and make on whether it should be replicated.

so it was so auburn was, you know, ground zero, but it very quickly spread. and so all the other systems that we know about that have similar models, they are all in direct relationship, in direct of auburn. and we're pushing back here in newton. okay. i manisha asks robyn, thanks for the great talk. i was wondering if you could compare this for profit convict labor, auburn prison with the later development of the convict lease system in the postwar south? sure, sure. so heather anne thompson has done really important work on this on this on exactly this comparison. so what thomson is that we should understand southern convict leasing practices post-civil war as as as as an adjustment on the pre-civil war practices that originated at

auburn. so you could you could she was for her for four for thomson the similarities are much more significant than the differences and there are important differences. southern post-civil war convict leasing is not primary early in factory based manufacturing, for example. so there are really important differences. but thomson's argument is that the similarities in the continuities are more important than the similar than the differences. and i agree with that and what i would also add is that the lines of influence are explicit and direct the post-civil war south was adapting process is that were innovated in the north and i'll go backwards just a moment to say there are these really wonderful books about convict leasing in the post-civil war south and they have produced so much knowledge that is so important and they have told the story of post-civil war convict

leasing so vividly that it has had these excellent books, have had the inadvertent effect of suggesting that that's the whole story. in fact, these wonderful books are starting the story in the middle. and by start and the story they tell is important and correct and true. but it's starting the story in the middle. and by starting the story with the civil war and the end of the civil war, what has happened inadvertently is that these excellent books have let the north off the hook. so one of the things that i want to accomplish with freeman's challenge is to put the north back on the hook. i saw a question over here, is it help? one second for the microphone. and i just i just wanted to ask or say, aren't there for profit prisons now? oh, yes, absolutely.

there are. there are so i'm sorry, do i say more? but do they are they run the same way as they had been before? and yes and no. so different states have different laws. so in new york state there is still in prison, forced manufacturing. and one thing that i want to state really clearly is that auburn was never a private prison. nowadays, when we say prison profit, often we assume it's a private prison. and so this is one of the the arguments that i really want to make is that when we're talking about a prison for profit, meaning a prison that was built for the purpose of generating profits, that's not necessarily a private prison. so absolutely, there are profits of in prisons today. it varies state to state. how that manifests in new york state, there are no longer there is no longer a partnership with private companies. so in new york state, you do not

have the same convict leasing that william freeman experienced where he was. his work was being leased by private companies that no longer exists in new york state. now, today in new york state, there is massive manufacturing. but what incarcerated people build in new york state is materials that are then sold only to the state itself. so things like license plates, for example. so that is a difference, you know, in some ways. but it's still forced labor and that's why the work of 13th forward is so important. 13th forward is working to end forced labor in prisons in new york state. they get. oh, yes, they do get paid, but they get paid in new york state by the way, there are plenty of incarcerated people in the united states who get paid nothing, who are forced to labor and get paid nothing. and that is true in many, many states in new york state, people in prisons are paid for their work, but they are vastly

underpaid. so they get paid, for example, the men who make license in the in auburn today, they get paid $0.65 an hour. so this not a living wage. and we need to remember that william freeman wanted wages, but he also wanted fair wages and that is not what we have in new york state today. and again, this is what the bill about fairness and opportunity. this is exactly what that bill is all about. so 13 forward, please and convict labor in new york state. we have to stop soon. but you make a point in the book of about that even the 1840s there were states that paid prisoners and new york was not one of them. and indeed when when he left after five years, they gave. to $2. this was part and you talk about the kind of social pressure that

produced that kind of modest compensation to, prisoners who were relieving. i wish we should stop soon because we're out of we're at about an hour. but we can take we can take two more questions. yeah. and then we have one up front. okay. in your talk, you mentioned william freeman using humor to assert his humanity and resist the state while in prison. can you offer any particular examples of how he used humor in these ways? yeah. yeah. what he did was while was in one of these. in one of these factories, what he would do is he would make silly faces and cause other prisoners to laugh because they did look in each other's faces. they were not permitted to, but of course they did do it. and he and this was this was not just him. this was a game that a lot of prisoners played where they would try to make each other laugh and and it was it was it was a very humanizing game, but

it was also a really dangerous game. he was he was caught and he was whipped for it. and he also he was he was whipped multiple times. one time he danced. dancing was also forbidden. he was dancing and he was he was whipped for that. i mean, that's not humorous, but these are exam plays of ways that he claimed his humanity and resisted the dehumanization of the prison. and these are these were dangerous and courageous acts and it reminds us that he again he was this by everyone's description, playful and vibrant 15 year old got in trouble in ways that that young people do went into prison. and i know you've done a lot of work of cautioning us against the idea of innocence and except that in the case of, of course, black people, black boys and girls, young black people, that

they don't get the same kind of innocence. and so when he came out and he was 21, 22, changed and making this case about payment, about recompense, he was a young person. yeah, he was a young person making this kind of a student, as you say, clearly forced argument that i think also adds to to the to the clarity of your insight about how important his claim was. yeah. yeah. he was really young. he was a teenager while he was in prison. and and he in a lot of ways, he acted like a teenager, including some of his bravery and some of his bravado is i associate with with teenager ness. yeah. yeah. i'll take one more question. oh, i was just very curious. what, what women and horace greeley to say and also, was there anybody in the press who grasped the importance of

freemen saying this was the state? yeah. yeah. so walt whitman and horace greeley were basically interested in it from the perspective of the capital punishment. so walt whitman commented on it somewhat extensively in multiple, multiple columns. he spoke about it as part of his camp. he was against capital punishment, and he was arguing against that in in many cases including freedman's case. and he whitman is really interesting. he wrote one column in which he really recognized the challenge and he really backed it up in a lot of ways. and then all of his other columns on william freeman, he didn't do that at all. he reversed himself. so whitman is whitman is a little painful because he it and then he didn't. and why did he hear it in one

moment and then slip into not it in another moment? i couldn't say. and i didn't ask about james mccune smith, but i'll answer for him to james mccune smith commented on the case because he was furie was at william at william henry seward. he james mccune smith very clearly recognized the racism in william henry seward's defense of freemen, and he was absolutely furious at him for that part of the excellence of this book, i'll say again, is the way in which you navigate the complicated entanglements of what it is to think about race and racial legacy in american culture. and i said this to you, if one is building a class of trying to study that complexity and if morrison's beloved is in there and baldwin's the fire, next time, all these books that that ask any reader to figure out how do you witness and participate and find your place in the

story. i think we could say that your book would be there. so i just want to congratulate you and thank you. thank you for sharing it with us. what a phenomenal work. thank you so much. that's that means the world to me. i'm very touched that you would say that. thank you so much. and thank you all for for for being a part of this conversation conversation. thank robin bernstein. kevin quashie. what a conversation this is. this is what we hope to do with the american antiquarian society. to think about the past in all its complexity and its resonances for our own day. and you'vetonight. we're