Pulitzer Prize winning former Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson tells our nation s torturous racial history through his own family s story, starting with his great-grandfather s freedom from slavery and thread-ing his way to his own narrative and reaching today s Black Lives Matter movement, asking whether this time will be different.

On March 27, 1829, a wealthy white planter and entrepreneur named Richard Fordham purchased four enslaved African Americans from a woman named Isabella Perman. One of them was journalist Eugene Robinson s great-great-grandfather, a boy called Harry.

Starting from this transaction, which took place in Charleston, South Carolina, Freedom Lost, Freedom Won brings to life 200 years of our nation s 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 be-fore the Civil War. He was there when victorious Union troops marched into Charleston in 1865, ending slavery and guaranteeing liberty for Black people only on paper, though, and only for a time.

Robinson traces the arc of his familial lineage through the repeated cycles in which African Americans have fought their way upward to-ward freedom and opportunity, been forced back down again, and renewed their determined climb.

Freedom Lost, Freedom Won tells our country s tortuous racial history through Robinson s family s story of struggle and survival, pushing us to consider how far the nation has come willingly or not and how far it still has to go.