Eugene Robinson — Freedom Lost, Freedom Won: A Personal History of America

Roosevelt House is pleased to present Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and political analyst on MS NOW, Eugene Robinson, on his new book, Freedom Lost, Freedom Won: A Personal History of America. “A skillfully narrated journey into the past,” according to Kirkus Reviews, Robinson’s new book tells America’s tortuous racial history through his own family’s story of struggle and survival—pushing readers to consider how far the nation has come in its pursuit of equality, and how far it still has to go. He is in conversation with political scientist, historian, and author Saladin Ambar. Welcoming remarks by Roosevelt House Director Harold Holzer. On March 27, 1829, a wealthy white planter and entrepreneur named Richard Fordham purchased four enslaved African Americans from a woman named Isabella Perman, including Robinson’s great-great-grandfather, a boy called Harry. Starting from this transaction, Freedom Lost, Freedom Won brings to life 200 years of American history through the eyes of the remarkable family that Harry founded. Assigned a formal name—Henry Fordham—and put to work as a blacksmith, he achieved his own freedom a decade before the Civil War. Tracing the arc of his familial lineage, from his great-great-grandfather’s becoming a “free person of color” before emancipation, to his father’s odyssey in the Great Migration, to his own coming-of-age during the civil rights movement, Robinson’s book delivers an indictment of structural racism—and an illustration of how, at times, it has been overcome. Setting his extensive personal research within the larger historical context, Robinson powerfully captures the repeated cycles in which African Americans have fought their way upward toward freedom and opportunity, been forced back down again, and renewed their determined climb. Eugene Robinson is an award–winning journalist and political analyst on MS NOW. In 2025, he retired from the Washington Post, where, in a three-decade career, he held positions including city hall reporter, opinions columnist, associate editor, foreign editor, London correspondent, and South American correspondent. He is the author of Disintegration: The Splintering of Black America; Last Dance in Havana: The Final Days of Fidel and the Start of the New Cuban Revolution; and Coal to Cream: A Black Man’s Journey Beyond Color to an Affirmation of Race. In 2009, he received the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary for “his eloquent columns on the 2008 presidential campaign that focus on the election of the first African-American president, showcasing graceful writing and grasp of the larger historic picture.” Born in Orangeburg, South Carolina, he graduated from the University of Michigan. Saladin Ambar is Professor of Political Science and Senior Scholar at the Center on the American Governor at Rutgers University’s Eagleton Institute of Politics. He is the winner of the 2023 Association of American Publishers’ PROSE Best Book Award in Government and Politics for Stars and Shadows: The Politics of Interracial Friendship from Jefferson to Obama, for which he appeared at Roosevelt House. A scholarly adviser to the Lincoln Presidential Foundation and the Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library and Museum, his latest book, Murder on the Mississippi: The Shocking Crimes That Shaped Abraham Lincoln, was published in 2025 by Diversion Books. His book Malcolm X at Oxford Union: Racial Politics in a Global Era is in development for a feature film. This is his third appearance at Roosevelt House. Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute at Hunter College, May 21, 2026.