No Right to an Honest Living: The Struggles of Boston's Black Workers in the Civil War Era

From a Bancroft Prize winner, a harrowing portrait of Black workers and white hypocrisy in nineteenth-century Boston

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.

Author: Jacqueline Jones
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 01/10/2023
Pages: 544
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.76lbs
Size: 9.48h x 6.38w x 1.71d
ISBN: 9781541619791


Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 10/03/2022
Kirkus Reviews 11/15/2022
Booklist 01/01/2023 pg. 20

About the Author
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.