Join us as the 2024 Pulitzer Prize Winner in History, Jacqueline Jones, presents on her most recent work No Right to an Honest Living: The Struggles of Boston’s Black Workers in the Civil War Era.

Nineteenth-century 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, several groups of potential white allies proved indifferent to the plight of Black wage-earners. White abolitionists, labor reformers, city officials, Republicans, and academics refused to advocate for Black Bostonians, condemning most of them to poverty. Still, some Black entrepreneurs ingeniously created their own jobs and forged their own career paths. Highlighting the everyday struggles of ordinary Black workers, this study shows how inequality in the workplace prevented Boston—and the United States—from securing true equality for all.

This program is generously sponsored by the Friends of the Reading Public Library. Thank you!

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 and a two-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, she lives in Concord, Massachusetts.