No Right to An Honest Living (Winner of the Pulitzer Prize): The Struggles of Boston's Black Workers in the Civil War Era [Paperback]

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 ofAll That She Carried)

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.

InNo 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 Pulitzer Prize–winning book shows how injustice in the workplace prevented Boston—and the United States—from securing true equality for all.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, 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“The streets of Black Boston come alive inNo Right to an Honest Living, a sensitive, immersive, and exhaustive sl³i