CBH Talk | Book Launch of “Freedom Lost, Freedom Won”: Eugene Robinson and Darren Walker in Conversation

CBH is honored to host the launch of Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Eugene Robinson’s latest book, Freedom Lost, Freedom Won, a deeply personal and sweeping work of history, memory, and moral reckoning. Robinson will be led in conversation by Darren Walker.

Freedom Lost, Freedom Won traces two centuries of African American struggle, resilience, and unfinished freedom through one extraordinary family story. It begins on March 27, 1829, with a single transaction in Charleston, South Carolina: the purchase of four enslaved African Americans by a wealthy white planter. One of them was a boy named Harry—Robinson’s great-great-grandfather. From this stark point of origin, Robinson reconstructs the life of a man who would later be known as Henry Fordham, a skilled blacksmith who managed to buy his freedom a decade before the Civil War and witnessed Union troops enter Charleston in 1865, bringing emancipation that proved both transformative and heartbreakingly fragile.

Following his family across generations, Robinson charts the recurring cycle at the core of Black American history: hard-won gains toward freedom and citizenship, followed by deliberate reversals and renewed struggle. From Reconstruction-era political leadership crushed by Jim Crow, to the Great Migration, to Robinson’s own coming of age during the civil rights movement, the book draws on archival research, family records, and lived experience to illuminate how progress has so often been met with retrenchment and how resilience has endured nonetheless.

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Participants

Eugene Robinson is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist, former columnist, and associate editor of The Washington Post, author, and political analyst on MSNBC. His prior positions included foreign editor, London correspondent, and South American correspondent. Born in Orangeburg, South Carolina, he graduated from the University of Michigan and worked at the San Francisco Chronicle before joining The Washington Post. Freedom Lost, Freedom Won is his fourth book.

Darren Walker served as president of the Ford Foundation from 2013 to 2025. Previously Walker was vice president at the Rockefeller Foundation, overseeing global and domestic programs. In the 1990s, he was COO of the Abyssinian Development Corporation, Harlem’s largest community development organization. Walker co-founded both the US Impact Investing Alliance and the Presidents’ Council on Disability Inclusion in Philanthropy. He serves on many boards, including the National Gallery of Art, Carnegie Hall, the High Line, the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture, Committee to Protect Journalists, Ralph Lauren, Bloomberg Inc., and PepsiCo.