No Right to an Honest Living: The Struggles of Boston's Black Workers in the Civil War Era by Jacqueline Jones (review)

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• No Right to an Honest Living: The Struggles of Boston’s Black Workers in the Civil War Era by Jacqueline Jones
• Zebulon V. Miletsky

No Right to an Honest Living: The Struggles of Boston’s Black Workers in the Civil War Era. By Jacqueline Jones. (New York: Basic Books, 2023. Pp. viii, 532. $35.00, ISBN 978-1-5416-1979-1.)

In 2015, a study completed by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston determined that the median net worth of white households in Boston stood at $247,000, while the median net worth for Black households was only $8.00 (“The Color of Wealth in Boston,” bostonfed.org). In No Right to an Honest Living: The Struggles of Boston’s Black Workers in the Civil War Era, Jacqueline Jones gives us some of the reasons for this extreme economic disparity between white and Black Bostonians. In this magnificently researched work, Jones reconstructs a world that has been largely hidden from historians and scholars, one that has been realized through research prowess and sheer genius in the archives. She provides a more complete window into the work that Black Bostonians did—despite discrimination and prejudice—to advance Boston’s economy.

No Right to an Honest Living is a strong monograph unconstrained by convention. It is alive with a research-based narrative that paints unforgettable [End Page 439] imagery and is bolstered by unimpeachable brick-and-mortar evidence. Jones points out, for example, that the work of Black Bostonians took place within two distinct spheres, which were at the same time mutually reinforcing and antagonistic. These two domains, work in the legitimate economy and work in the so-called illegitimate economy, served as the primary venues for Black Bostonians’ toil during the Civil War. However, these two domains also served as the central tension and contradiction in the face of Boston’s presumed reputation as a place brimming with economic opportunity for African Americans. This inherent paradox is a thread that runs throughout the book, which Jones uses to show that Black Bostonians balanced their duality through creativity, ingenuity, and grit in the face of extreme difficulty.

Boston’s story is also important because it contradicted the view of white southerners who believed that African Americans would not be able to function in a free-labor environment. As Jones writes in her now classic Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present (New York, 1985), “The Yankees’ vision of a free labor market, in which individual blacks used their wits to strike a favorable bargain with a prospective employer, struck the former Confederates as a ludicrous idea and an impossible objective” (p. 52). In No Right to an Honest Living, Jones makes the point that even white northerners wondered whether the experiment of free labor would work in their own section. As Jones makes clear, readers tend to conflate Boston’s role as the headquarters of abolitionism with a presumed social and economic acceptance of African Americans. However, it was not mutually exclusive to be an abolitionist and at the same time to be against Black and white social and economic equality. Massachusetts may have been more generous with political rights extended to African American men, but man cannot live from rights alone. As Jones also makes clear, we need to include “race work” as a form of labor that was more often than not the only form of employment available to certain extraordinary Black men in Boston.

Jones has made a major contribution to the recent spate of offerings in the re-burgeoning field of Black Boston history—addressing long-held suspicions that without this text have been more difficult to prove, including issues of the income gap and affirmative action. It comes as an absolute affirmation. No Right to an Honest Living is a welcome entry into the discussion, which thus far has been lacking in explaining this phenomenon of joblessness and job scarcity. As we learn from this book, Black Bostonians’ economic woes have a longer history.

Zebulon V. Miletsky Stony Brook University Copyright © 2024 The Southern Historical Association ...