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.
"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."--Pulitzer Prize jury
"Extensively researched and carefully written."--Emerging Civil
War
"Jones brings this history to life with graceful storytelling and a
generous use of primary sources."--Christian Science Monitor
"No Right to an Honest Living is an essential text for readers
seeking to uncover material that challenges the myths of the north
offering better economic conditions for Black communities and
details the layers of struggles they faced for
generations."--Booklist, starred review
"Superb...A brilliant exposé of hypocrisy in action, showing that
anti-Black racism reigned on both sides of the Mason-Dixon
Line."--Kirkus, starred review
"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."
--Marcia Chatelain, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Franchise
"In No Right to An Honest Living, Jones provides a deeply
researched, provocatively rendered, and engagingly written analysis
of the conflict between Boston's egalitarian rhetoric and its
racially segregated and economically exploitative reality. Black
Bostonians were free, fiercely political, and comparatively
successful in their fight against legal segregation and the
rendition of fugitive slaves by an antebellum Federal system
dedicated to the 'peculiar institution.' Yet, even as they launched
a radical abolition movement alongside white antislavery allies,
Black Bostonians faced employment discrimination and workplace
exclusion that belied the city's self-righteous professions of
racial exceptionalism. 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
"Jones has done a superb job of capturing the complexity and hard
edges of a turbulent era in US history. Her compelling book
demonstrates that neither Boston's powerful current of abolitionism
nor a great war that destroyed the institution of slavery could
remove the race-based social and economic constraints that
bedeviled the city's Black residents."
--Gary W. Gallagher, author of The Enduring Civil War
"Jones is one of our greatest historians of race in American
society. In this elegantly crafted, deeply researched book, she
reconstructs the troubled history of Black labor in
nineteenth-century Boston through compelling biographical vignettes
of workers and reformers alike. Her book is a profound reflection
on the enduring tensions between America's high-minded rhetoric of
liberty and equality and the persistence of racial injustice."
--Thomas J. Sugrue, author of Sweet Land of Liberty
"Jones's No Right to an Honest Living demonstrates the deadly
convergence of the racial and capitalist orders in Civil War-era
Boston, where there was no pathway to freedom but through work--and
Black people were excluded from work. A singular contribution to
the history of racial capitalism in the Deep North."
--Walter Johnson, author of The Broken Heart of America
"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."
--Tiya Miles, National Book Award-winning author of All That She
Carried
"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
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