"In No Right to An Honest Living , Jones provides a deeply researched, provocatively rendered, and engagingly written analysis of the conflict between Boston's egalitarian rhetoric and its racially segregated and economically exploitative reality. Black Bostonians were free, fiercely political, and comparatively successful in their fight against legal segregation and the rendition of fugitive slaves by an antebellum Federal system dedicated to the 'peculiar institution.' Yet, even as they launched a radical abolition movement alongside white antislavery allies, Black Bostonians faced employment discrimination and workplace exclusion that belied the city's self-righteous professions of racial exceptionalism. Through attentive descriptions of individual Black Bostonians--the attorney Robert Morris; the Reverend Leonard Grimes and his wife, Octavia C. Grimes; Union Army surgeon Dr. John V. DeGrasse--and the segregated economy in which they lived, Jones provides a prescient analysis of race and labor that resonates in our current political moment. A triumph of historical research, this book will be a foundational text in nineteenth century labor history.

" -- Kerri Greenidge, author of Black Radical.