The building was constructed in the 1860s. The U.S. Congress created Freedman’s banks during Reconstruction. The Freedman’s Bank in Shreveport was the second location in Louisiana. And in case ...

On March 3, 1865, in the final days of the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln and Congress established the Freedman’s Savings Bank—a radical idea at the time. The vision was simple but ...

We use novel data from the Freedman’s Savings Bank—created following the American Civil War to serve free Blacks—employing an instrumental variables strategy exploiting the staggered rollout of bank ...