Pulitzer Prize Winner Series: Jacqueline Jones, Author of No Right to An Honest Living: The Struggles of Boston’s Black Workers in the Civil War Era

Jacqueline Jones , the Ellen C. Temple Professor of Women’s History Emerita at the University of Texas at Austin, will discuss her book, No Right to An Honest Living: The Struggles of Boston’s Black Workers in the Civil War Era, winner of the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for History.

In No Right to an Honest Living, 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, No Right to an Honest Living shows how injustice in the workplace prevented Boston—and the United States—from securing true equality for all. 

Book sale and signing by Elm Street Books.

Registration required.

Jacqueline Jones is a historian and author of several books, including, most recently, No Right to an Honest Living: The Struggles of Boston's Black Workers in the Civil War Era and Goddess of Anarchy: The Life and Times of Lucy Parsons. A Dreadful Deceit: The Myth of Race from the Colonial Era to Obama’s America and Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work and the Family from Slavery to the Present were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize; Labor of Love won the Bancroft Prize in 1986. Other works include Saving Savannah: The City and the Civil War, 1854-1872, Creek Walking: Growing Up in Delaware in the 1950s, A Social History of the Laboring Classes from Colonial Times to the Present, American Work: Four Centuries of Black and White Labor, The Dispossessed: America’s Underclasses from the Civil War to the Present and Soldiers of Light and Love: Northern Teachers and Georgia Blacks, 1865-1873.

Professor Jones has won numerous grants and awards, including a MacArthur Fellowship. She served as Vice President for the Professional Division of the American Historical Association from 2011 to 2014.