NEW YORK, October 28—Simon & Schuster announced today that it will publish a memoir by Pulitzer Prize winning Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson, titled Freedom Lost, Freedom Won. Robinson has established himself as an authority on the political landscape and the current racial tensions in the country, and with this book, he tells our nation’s torturous racial history through his own family’s story, spanning two hundred years of struggle and survival. Starting with his great-grandfather’s freedom from slavery and threading his way to his own narrative and reaching today’s Black Lives Matter movement, Robinson asks whether this time be different. Black Americans have been promised freedom and equality, only to have it taken away repeatedly, and argues that we will begin to dismantle structural racism only if we come to terms with this history.

Robinson says, “When I walk across the fifty-foot lettering of Black Lives Matter Plaza and then look up at the White House just a block away, I have to agree with the late John Lewis. I have to believe that this time may really be different, that the nation may finally be ready to begin a reckoning with the systemic racism that poisons our society. This reckoning can only happen, however, if Americans first acknowledge the history that brought us to this point. And that history cannot be acknowledged unless it is known, and it will not be known unless it is told. That is what I’m trying to do with this book.”

Dana Canedy adds, “Eugene Robinson is one of the leading thinkers and voices of our time. This memoir that will be a quintessential story of the America experience told through the tale of his proud, honorable African American family. The key theme that runs through the Robinson family story—from the Civil War through the Civil Rights era to Black Lives Matter—is how many times Freedoms were won and then were lost—or stolen.”

Dana Canedy, Senior Vice President and Publisher of Simon & Schuster acquired World and First Serial Rights from Rafe Sagalyn at ICM Partners, and the book is slated to publish in 2022.

Eugene Robinson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist at The Washington Post and political analyst for MSNBC. In a three-decade career at The Washington Post, Robinson has been city hall reporter, city editor, foreign correspondent in Buenos Aires and London, foreign editor, and assistant managing editor in charge of the paper’s Style section. He started writing a column for the Op-Ed page in 2005. 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.” Robinson is the author of Disintegration: The Splintering of Black America (2010), Last Dance in Havana (2004), and Coal to Cream: A Black Man’s Journey Beyond Color to an Affirmation of Race (1999).

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