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The Struggles of Boston's Black Workers in the Civil War Era
by Jacqueline Jones
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.
What are you reading this week? (5/22/2025)
I am reading "Properties of Thirst" by Marianne Wiggins and it is intense. Next up is "No Right to an Honest Living" by Jacqueline Jones, last year's Pulitzer winner in history.
-Anthony_Conty
Pulitzer Prize, 2024
"Superb social history of a Boston that, while nominally abolitionist, found little room in its 19th-century economy for Black workers...A brilliant exposé of hypocrisy in action, showing that anti-Black racism reigned on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"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." - Publishers Weekly
"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." - Tiya Miles, National Book Award-winning author of All That She Carried
"Through attentive descriptions of individual Black Bostonians—the attorney Robert Morris; the Reverend Leonard Grimes and his wife, Octavia C. Grimes; Union Army surgeon Dr. John V. DeGrasse—and the segregated economy in which they lived, Jones provides a prescient analysis of race and labor that resonates in our current political moment. A triumph of historical research, this book will be a foundational text in nineteenth century labor history." - Kerri Greenidge, author of Black Radical
This information about No Right to an Honest Living was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
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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