No Right to an Honest Living

Hardcover, 544 pages

English language

Published Jan. 10, 2023 by Basic Books.

ISBN:: 978-1-5416-1979-1
OCLC Number:: 1334652984
ASIN:: 154161979X
Goodreads:: 61030735

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 …

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.

3 editions

Ben Waber reviewed No Right to an Honest Living by Jacqueline Jones

A Detailed, Case-Focused History

4 stars

This book uses a case-focused lens to illustrate how despite Boston's role as the center of the abolitionist movement it systematically discriminated against Black workers and generally tolerated high levels of everyday racism in society. While Jones occasionally steps back and looks at larger trends, this is much more about the stories of individuals, businesses, and organizations throughout the Greater Boston area. She mostly refrains from using quantitative metrics, making it challenging to evaluate claims made about the degree to which a certain practice or trend is significant. That's fairly glaring in a history dealing with core economic issues, I'd love another edition that adds that in. If you live in the area, however, it's even more critical for you to understand this history. Highly recommend

Ben Waber

rated it

October 20

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