The Harvard Trade Union Program presents the annual James Green Memorial Forum, “No Right to an Honest Living,” with historian Jacqueline Jones. In her book, No Right to an Honest Living: The Struggles of Boston’s Black Workers, 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.
ABOUT JACQUELINE JONES
Jacqueline Jones is a historian and the 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. She is the Ellen C. Temple Professor of Women’s History Emerita at the University of Texas at Austin.
