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	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Maren Wiederhold
Categories
Politics & government

NO RIGHT TO AN HONEST LIVING

Jacqueline Jones

The Struggles of Boston's Black Workers in the Civil War Era

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. Jacqueline Jones?is the Ellen C. Temple Professor of Women's History Emerita at the University of Texas at Austin and the past president of the American Historical Association. Winner of the Bancroft Prize for Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow and a two-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, she lives in Concord, Massachusetts.

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Book Published 2023-01-10 by Basic Books

Comments

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.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in History

The streets of Black Boston come alive in No Right to an Honest Living, a sensitive, immersive, and exhaustive study of African American workers, their dreams, and their disappointments in the diasporic port city on the bay. A gifted practitioner of labor history and urban history, Jacqueline Jones pulls back the curtain of everyday life in this book, revealing the complexities of Black class positionality, the financial costs of abolitionist activism, the contours of the underground economy, the hidden contributions of Black women's labor inside their own homes, the dramatic effects of Irish immigration and economic recession on Black job prospects, and the fight of Black Civil War soldiers to gain fair pay for their service. In Jones's careful rendering, Boston is sometimes a safe haven and always a place of marginalization for the Black migrants and laborers who changed the city even as they made it home.

An essential labor history and an incredible history of the Civil War era. By focusing on Boston as a site of abolitionist activism and racist work policies, Jones offers expansive insights into the stakes of ending the institution of slavery and ushering in a period of freedom. With graceful writing and sharp analysis, Jones brings us a fuller story of the transition from Emancipation to Reconstruction to Jim Crow.

Superb... A brilliant exposé of hypocrisy in action, showing that anti-Black racism reigned on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line.

A breathtakingly original reconstruction of free Black life in Boston that profoundly reshapes our understanding of the city's abolitionist legacy and the challenging reality for its Black residents.