No Right To An Honest Living The Struggles Of Bostons Black Workers In The Civil War Era Jacqueline Jones by Jacqueline Jones 9781541619791, 9781541619807, 154161979X, 1541619803 instant download after payment.

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, & after the Civil War, white abolitionists & 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 & forged their own career paths.

Highlighting the everyday struggles of ordinary Black workers, this book shows how injustice in the workplace prevented Boston—& the United States—from securing true equality for all. 

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Jacqueline Jones is the Ellen C. Temple Professor of Women’s History Emerita at the University of Texas at Austin & the past president of the American Historical Association. Winner of the Bancroft Prize for Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow & a two-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, she lives in Concord, Massachusetts.