No Right to An Honest Living (Winner of the Pulitzer Prize)
The Struggles of Boston's Black Workers in the Civil War Era
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- $25.99
Publisher Description
WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE IN HISTORY
A “sensitive, immersive, and exhaustive” portrait of Black workers and white hypocrisy in nineteenth-century Boston, from “a gifted practitioner of labor history and urban history” (Tiya Miles, National Book Award-winning author of All That She Carried)
Impassioned antislavery rhetoric made antebellum Boston famous as the nation’s hub of radical abolitionism. In fact, however, the city was far from a beacon of equality.
In No Right to an Honest Living, historian Jacqueline Jones reveals how Boston was the United States writ small: a place where the soaring rhetoric of egalitarianism was easy, but justice in the workplace was elusive. Before, during, and after the Civil War, white abolitionists and Republicans refused to secure equal employment opportunity for Black Bostonians, condemning most of them to poverty. Still, Jones finds, some Black entrepreneurs ingeniously created their own jobs and forged their own career paths.
Highlighting the everyday struggles of ordinary Black workers, this book shows how injustice in the workplace prevented Boston—and the United States—from securing true equality for all.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Boston's reputation as an abolitionist hotbed in the decades before the Civil War belies the "casual cruelty" its Black residents endured, according to this eye-opening history. Bancroft Prize winner Jones (Goddess of Anarchy) notes that Black Bostonians "enjoyed rights denied to their counterparts in other parts of the North," but claims that the city's abolitionists, while eloquent and well-organized, had limited sway. Even fiery antislavery activist William Lloyd Garrison refrained from advocating for improved conditions for the city's Black workforce, lest he alienate potential supporters of abolitionism. Though few white Bostonians publicly expressed support for enslavement, many residents, "Brahmin" aristocrats and Irish immigrants alike, refused to accept people of color as their equals, according to Jones. Denied entry to "conventional workplaces," many Black Bostonians found jobs as "rat catchers, youthful errand-runners for professional gamblers, dance-hall musicians, and scammers." Expertly drawing from court records, newspaper articles, and other primary sources, Jones interweaves fine-grained accounts of internal debates with the antislavery movement with poignant depictions of the struggles and triumphs of ordinary Black Bostonians. The result is a nuanced and noteworthy addition to the history of race relations in America.
