Pioneering Boston attorney Robert Morris.
Jones’ book, published in January 2023.
Local author highlights civil war era struggles
In the decades before and after the Civil War, Boston was a nexus of abolitionist activity. William Lloyd Garrison published The Liberator, in whose pages abolitionists including Frederick Douglass called for an end to slavery.
Despite the city’s reputation for liberal politics, Blacks living here in the 1800s faced rigid barriers to employment and were often relegated to domestic service and other low-paying menial work.
Historian Jacqueline Jones, a Concord resident who retired from the University of Texas after teaching at Wellesley College and Brandeis University, unearthed the histories of Black activists and laborers and the whites who employed them in her book, “No Right to an Honest Living,” published this year by Basic Books.
Starting with the story of 66 emancipated Blacks who arrived in Boston in 1847 and struggled to find work, Jones uses the stories of individual workers and civil rights advocates to describe the travails Black workers faced in 19th-century Boston.
The stories of some of the more successful businessmen and entrepreneurs — including pioneering attorney Robert Morris, dance hall owner and barber Joseph Clash, clothier Lewis Hayden and educator-activist James Monroe Trotter — are woven in with those of countless workers who barely eked
out a living to paint a picture of a constant struggle against the
racist attitudes of white tradesmen and white abolitionists alike.
The following interview with Jones has been edited for brevity.
Boston
is often presented as a hub of abolitionist activity. But when you peel
back the layers, it’s not at all what people thought it was.
Right.
I think Boston had a well-earned reputation for being the center of
radical abolitionism. William Lloyd Garrison started the Liberator and
Anti-Slavery Society. Certainly, Frederick Douglass was associated with
Boston.
You had
Theodore Parker, Wendell Phillips. Actually, abolitionists were in a
minority in the city, although they made a lot of noise. They gave a lot
of speeches, and they produced newspapers. But what I found was that
when it came to an understanding of their Black neighbors, many of these
white abolitionists were indifferent or they were openly hostile.
They
obviously cared more about enslaved people in the South, and we can’t
fault them for their courage in standing up for abolitionism at a time
when that was not popular among the vast majority of white people, but
at the same time, it’s really striking to see how these whites —
Garrison, Phillips, Theodore Parker and others — really were not that
interested in economic justice for Black Bostonians.
I imagine you came to this project with a sense of that. Did anything that you unearthed surprise you?
Well,
I really didn’t know what to expect. A lot of historical literature on
the North focuses on civil rights like the right to vote, to serve on
juries, for kids to attend integrated schools, [and] the right to
intermarriage. Those have been the major issues that historians have
looked at when it comes to the North during this period. Nobody that I
found really was looking at the issue of work. And I thought that was
odd because work is such a central life experience. We know that
ordinary Black people — men and women — were consumed with the issue of
work because it was so difficult to get a stable job. And there were so
many barriers, so many kinds of discrimination. So, I really thought it
was worth spending a whole book looking at the issue of work, even
though other historians have looked at some of these other civil rights.
You
put a lot of attention on individual stories of people, including those
involved in criminal enterprises. What was the importance of surfacing
some of those stories?
I
took the title [of] the book from a speech that John Rock gave in 1860,
when he said that Black people in Boston had no right to an honest
living. But that left open the question, well, how about a socalled
dishonest living? When I looked at what was going on in the North End —
especially with the dance halls and brothels, the rat pits (gambling
establishments), the gambling dens — I found a really multi-ethnic,
multiracial community there with Blacks and whites fighting, sleeping
together, drinking together, gambling. That was
very different from the kind of legitimate economy that was very
segregated. And what I did was I just looked at the jobs that some of
these people had — pickpockets, prostitutes, dancehall purveyors. Joseph
Clash, obviously, was a central figure here,
but I just consider those as forms of work. We often put those
activities in the category of crime and let it go at that. But if we
look at them as kinds of work, we ask the same questions, like what’s
the pay? I think that kind of suggests to us that, you know, there are
all sorts of ways to make a living. There are all kinds of ways to put
food on the table and pay the rent. And these were options for some
people who had very limited opportunities in the legitimate economy.
As
formerly enslaved people came to Boston, it seems many went to
settlement houses that operated with a mixture of altruism and
opportunism.
They
were kind of employment agencies or, I guess, placement agencies. The
issue there, it seemed to me, was white women are fleeing domestic
service and they’re writing about how awful it is, how demeaning, and
the women employers are so mean-spirited and tight-fisted. And
meanwhile, the Freedmen’s Bureau is paying for hundreds, literally
hundreds of people to come up from Virginia, mainly women and children
to fill those slots, and at a low wage. But they’re told, ‘Please don’t
bring your kids because these employers don’t want your kids in the
house when you’re doing their work.’
It’s
taken more than 100 years for employment opportunities to open up for
Blacks, Latinos and Asians in Boston. In the 1970s and ’80s, major city
departments — police, fire, schools — were under consent decrees to hire
people of color.
Absolutely.
And one of the issues here is if we look at the whole region and not
just this city — the suburbs enacted zoning laws that limited housing to
single-family dwellings on big lots and lots of open space. It’s hard
to afford those kinds of dwellings. And there was accumulation over the
years in Boston, where Black people were limited to menial jobs, to
part-time jobs, to sporadic and casual work. They weren’t going to be
able to build up their assets and afford to buy a house, especially in
the suburbs. So, it’s really all of a piece, and I think that the work
is the central issue here. I didn’t take the story past 1900 but I think
all factors pointed to the continuation of these policies.