No Right to an Honest Living

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

By: Jacqueline Jones

Narrated by: Leon Nixon

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE IN HISTORY

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, 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 opportunities 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.

©2023 Jacqueline Jones (P)2024 Dreamscape Media

Critic reviews

“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)

Too much repititive detail, to the point that I ended up disliking the book would not recommend to my friends.

Extensive review of history that isn’t taught in most history courses. Extensive scholarly research on an important subject

Informative and humbling

Comprehensive and well organized. I have the book in print version, but also purchased it on audio in an attempt to read it faster. Definitely reads more like a history book than books that have a more narrative style to them, but it had no problem holding my interest. While I knew that life was not easy for any Blacks at that time, I at least thought that Boston was a bit of an oasis. Unfortunately, I realized that a lot of the support for our Black compatriots was in word only. Boston talked the talk, but in no means walked the walk.