NO RIGHT TO AN HONEST LIVING

Superb social history of a Boston that, while nominally abolitionist, found little room in its 19th-century economy for Black workers.

In the years leading to the Civil War, writes Bancroft Prize–winning historian Jones, Black Bostonians faced numerous obstacles. There was old-fashioned “overt racial prejudice,” and then there was the related “hard-nosed calculation that the white laboring classes were too potent a political force to aggravate with calls for Black economic opportunity.” Competition with newly arrived Irish immigrants for low-wage work often saw Blacks unable to secure adequate employment. Given that “wage earning was a key signifier of citizenship,” Blacks in Boston were effectively less than full citizens. Even the onset of Civil War and, in time, the admission of Black troops into the Army did little to address basic inequalities. As so often explains matters historical, much of this had to do with economics. For example, while laws that “required Black seamen to be incarcerated while their ships were in southern ports” may have drawn murmurs of protest on the parts of sailors and abolitionists, the shipowners were disinclined to join them, recognizing that those ports represented money. In the end, Jones shows with her characteristic combination of meticulous research and able storytelling, while Blacks constituted a small segment of the professional classes, many more required public assistance, which worked, abolitionists feared, to prove that Blacks were naturally indolent and that their objection to “ill-paid, disagreeable work was somehow a function of their ‘race.’ ” Even after the war, nothing changed: Many Boston jobs required political patronage available only to White workers, and as a result, “for the period 1865 to 1920, Black men constituted just barely 1 percent of the commonwealth’s workforce.” Arguably, those patterns of old endure today, if perhaps better disguised than the open racism of old.

A brilliant exposé of hypocrisy in action, showing that anti-Black racism reigned on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line.