This Pulitzer Prize–winning volume will no doubt help to frame the study of Civil War–era African American and US urban, labor, and political history for years to come. Focusing on the lives of Black workers in the principal Massachusetts Bay city, this book offers a model study of working-class Black life and labor during the most fraught and conflicted moment in the nation’s history. Alongside detailed analyses of a wide range of Civil War–era working-class Black individuals and families, historian Jacqueline Jones provides unique insights into the lives of “the Edloe Sixty-Six.” A human cargo of free Black men, women, and children, the Edloe group arrived in Boston on September 15, 1847, from Prince George’s County, Virginia. Firsthand accounts of this group’s experience offer a unifying and interpretive thread that runs throughout the narrative. As such, this book contributes to the ongoing transformation of the historiography of American and African American workers.By the turn of the twenty-first century, African American urban history had emerged as one of the most prolific areas in US and African American scholarship. The transformation of knowledge in the urban field continues to unfold. Recent scholarship reveals how African American urban history emerged “on a transnational stage” during the Atlantic slave trade and stayed there through the rise of the new republic, the Civil War, and the early postbellum years and beyond. Despite this tremendous groundswell of compelling research on the Black urban experience nationwide, over time, and transnationally, few scholars have placed the work, quest for work, and workplace history of African Americans at the center of local urban case studies of the Civil War years. Indeed, much scholarship on that war revolves around the celebratory rhetoric, legacy, and historiography of the northern antislavery movement and its heroic fight to emancipate enslaved southern Blacks. Jacqueline Jones challenges this narrative. She shows how antislavery white Bostonians repeatedly ignored the discriminatory treatment of African American workers in their own front yard.No Right to an Honest Living documents ongoing and nearly implacable racial barriers on the livelihood of Black workers. The city’s sharply etched, caste-like color line excluded African Americans from the most lucrative jobs in the city’s free wage economy from the onset of the Civil War through emancipation and the postbellum years. Abolitionist entrepreneurs and employers denied African Americans equal access to the city’s free labor economy, even as they vociferously advocated for the abolition of slavery in the southern states. As Jones succinctly states, “Many white radicals expressed sympathy in general for ‘labor’ at home and abroad and condemned the concentration of capital in the North and the South; but in Boston these white reformers failed to extend their critique of an exploitative economic system to segregated worksites” (8).In short, Jones documents the painful impact of the racially divided workforce on the city’s Black population of fugitives from the South and free people of color—those born and raised in Boston and other parts of the urban North as well as the South. But No Right to an Honest Living is by no means a static tale of gloom and doom for the city’s Black population. The city’s economy and the place of African Americans within it changed over time as federal authorities escalated the recruitment of white troops and home-front workers to help put down the southern rebellion. The Civil War itself opened the door for some Black workers to breach the color line in certain jobs, especially as government employees, messengers, and postal service workers, which previously had been off-limits to Black people.Most important, however, is that despite facing tremendous odds, Black Bostonians forged their own unique strategies for resisting the debilitating impact of racial capitalism on their lives as workers and members of the urban community. The city’s Black workers channeled their various skills into the building of substantial business enterprises as barbers, hairdressers, caterers, restaurant owners, and proprietors of rental properties; mobilized their meager earnings to build an expanding range of churches, fraternal halls, and schools for their children; and forged dynamic, though precarious, underground commercial networks of goods and services, including alcoholic beverages, brothels, and exchanges of stolen goods. Entrepreneurship, work, and community development were highly gendered processes, with African American women shouldering a disproportionate burden as underpaid wage earners; as caretakers; as institution-building activists; and, equally and perhaps most important, as liberation movement organizers.Fueled largely by the labor of Black women, African Americans launched diverse social movements on behalf of enslaved bondsmen and women as well as disfranchised and exploited free people of color. These movements included scathing critiques of the offensive racial ideology of their white abolitionist allies and friends. The book’s title, for example, was taken from a fiery public speech by Dr. John S. Rock, the schoolteacher, dentist, and physician. Rock charged his white friends and allies with harboring the racist idea that “colored men have no right to earn an honest living—they must be starved out” (2). Although the majority of free people of color as well as fugitives remained disfranchised for lack of taxable property, they nonetheless participated in mass meetings and gave alternating support to the Republican, Democratic, and even the nativist Know Nothing Party depending on their changing assessment of their own interests. Despite their engagement in cross-class partisan politics, Jones convincingly concludes that Boston’s Black working class clearly understood that “no one can live by constitutional rights alone” (415). They desired most of all to remove racial barriers from the city’s urban workforce and enjoy opportunities for a better living on an equal basis with their Euro-American counterparts.As we near the second quarter of the twenty-first century, Black workers’ lives remain vulnerable to the vagaries of contemporary racial capitalism and politics. As Jones makes clear, from the outset of the nation’s history, African Americans “had no right to make an honest living,” but the US Constitution “stipulated no such right for any person” (5). Boston’s Black workers’ persistent wage insecurity not only undermined their access to full citizenship rights; it also revealed profound contradictions in the thought and political behavior of their white friends who consistently failed to heed their ongoing plea “to address the city’s discriminatory division of labor” (5). Today, as we seek reparatory justice for descendants of African people enslaved in North America, No Right to an Honest Living provides an invaluable resource for navigating the road ahead. Specifically, it encourages us to take a close look at the persistence of inequality in our racially divided digital age workplaces.
Joe William Trotter (Sun,) studied this question.