Episode 146: Black Labor in Boston

[00:00:00] Ben Wright: This is 15 Minute History, a podcast for educators, students, and anyone interested in history, featuring the minds and voices of the University of Texas at Austin.

In his Pulitzer Prize winning memoir, the Bostonian Henry Adams wrote that the American boy of 1854 stood nearer to the year one than to the year 1900. So transformative were the changes in life. Wealth and work wrought upon the United States during that period. Those changes were indeed profound in Adams hometown of Boston.

And yet, for the majority of the city’s black men and women, life and work in 1900 were not that different from in the 1850s. Despite Boston’s proud progressive history, I’m joined today by Professor Jackie Jones, whose new book, No Right to an Honest Living, traces the struggles of Boston’s black workers in the Civil War era.

Like Adams, she won a Pulitzer Prize for her path breaking work. Professor Jones book not only reconstructs black life, and indeed white hypocrisy, in compelling detail, it also shows scholars and students alike the incredible value that labor history furnishes us with for understanding the past. Jackie, welcome to 15 Minute History.

[00:01:29] Jackie Jones: Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here.

[00:01:32] Ben Wright: Um, Boston is incredibly different in 1900 than it is in 1850, like all American cities. And this is a transformation in technology, social relations, and indeed work. But this is a transformation that, where the Black community in Boston are left behind. Can you talk us through that a little bit?

Sure.

[00:01:54] Jackie Jones: Yes, it was striking to me that black people in 1900 were doing essentially the same kinds of work that they were doing in 1840. In other words, the same kind of work that their grandparents and great grandparents were doing 60 years earlier. So you’re absolutely right about these. transformations in terms of technology, the rise of the retail sector, clerical work, and so forth, professional work.

Most black women were domestic servants or laundresses throughout this period, and most black men were casual laborers, menial laborers, servants, gardeners, stable hands during this period. So it is striking that in the midst of tremendous upheaval, and we have to count the Civil War here, certainly the loss of 700, 000 lives, the Second Industrial Revolution in the late 19th century, despite all of these tumultuous events, The racial division of labor remains essentially the same, and that has all sorts of implications for the welfare of black families over time.

[00:03:22] Ben Wright: So as the 20th century dawns, uh, there’s sort of this portrait in your book that, uh, white workers, even white immigrant workers, sort of are off to this head start when it comes to education, types of work they’re doing. What’s the legacy of this holding back of black workers?

[00:03:40] Jackie Jones: Well, certainly, if we’re looking at a group of people who are limited to low wage, exploitative kinds of labor, we’re talking about people who have to rent, they cannot afford to buy their own homes, and That’s significant for several reasons.

One is they remain at the mercy of landlords, mostly white landlords, who feel free to charge exorbitant rates for rents, thus harming the most vulnerable people who have the least resources. Secondly, they cannot, um, establish Homeownership, which means their assets will remain low or non existent, and later in the 20th century, they cannot afford to move to the suburbs because they don’t have the resources and the intergenerational wealth that will allow them to do that.

So I really see. Low wages as the key factor here in the immiseration of the black population of Boston, and the fact that they cannot, um, Own their own homes. I think the contrast here is with immigrant workers who did get city public works jobs, and that’s significant. I mean, I think the estimate is that in 1900, a third of all households in South Boston counted on public works.

Jobs as a source of stability, economic stability, and black workers certainly couldn’t count on those jobs because they were shut out of them. They were also mostly shut out of jobs as school teachers. Firefighters, police officers, and again, these are ladders of upward mobility for immigrants. Ladders that are not available to black men and women at the time.

[00:05:56] Ben Wright: You’ve called this in your book, casual cruelty, and I’m curious about that term, because it seems like there isn’t necessarily a conspiracy here, right? There isn’t necessarily a sort of, a system in place, but the end result is the same. Is this a sort of ad hoc, um, set of prejudices or is there some sort of unifying factor behind them?

[00:06:22] Jackie Jones: Well, I look at six groups of potential allies for Black workers during this period. Let me just go over them briefly. Abolitionists, who obviously cared about the plight of enslaved men and women in the South, but they showed very little interest. Interest or concern about their black neighbors in Boston, the Republican party before, during, and after the war presented itself as an egalitarian party, but most of its elected officials.

were uninterested in promoting economic justice in the workplace. And indeed in Boston, Black people were a very small percentage of the electorate, and so not considered a worthy constituency of either political party during this period. I also look at labor reformers, white labor reformers, who might have stood up for and advocated for black workers, but in fact they were much more concerned with factory operatives during this period and not so concerned about menial laborers or unskilled laborers.

City authorities, we might I think felt an obligation to black taxpayers, many black men did vote, they paid their poll tax because they owned property in the form of furniture, not in the form of real estate, but they did vote, but they again, um, did not wield much influence. In Boston and city authorities felt free to ignore them when it came to, uh, hiring workers to, uh, work in the parks, on the streets, in construction projects and so forth.

I also look at white veterans who of all people, uh, should have recognized the tremendous sacrifices made by black military men, both seamen and soldiers. And yet, uh, kept their own veterans organizations segregated after the war. And finally, uh, I consider academics and social workers in Boston in the late 19th century, and they certainly seem to be promoting these pseudo scientific, uh, ideas of racism.

In the city, and they, they also seek to justify the exclusion of black workers from, say, department store work, factory work. Um, so, uh, there are a variety of white groups here who discriminate for their own reasons. There’s not one reason. There are many reasons, and in some cases, these patterns of exclusion are not that, overt, or rather not that well justified, they’re just not, inclusion is not there.

So, I guess that’s what I meant by casual cruelty, that this is not a violent system. It doesn’t depend on violent rhetoric or violent action. Um, it’s just, uh, kind of built into the political economy of the city of Boston and its environs. And

[00:10:04] Ben Wright: this image of Boston doesn’t necessarily sit well with The self image that Boston has at the time and that Boston has itself as a progressive city with a progressive legacy today. Um, can you walk us through a little bit of those memory dynamics?

[00:10:21] Jackie Jones: Yes, I mean, before the war, obviously Boston had what it considered a well earned reputation for being a site of egalitarianism, radical abolitionism.

Um, I should note that By 1860, Black men in Boston could vote as they could in all of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. That was guaranteed to them in the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780. Black men, um, Black men and women could marry, white men and women, uh, interracial marriage was legal, black and white children could attend the public schools together, black men were beginning to serve on juries.

I mean, all of these factors are key to citizenship and they all set Massachusetts somewhat apart from other states in the North at the time. Uh, they were more progressive, more liberal in a lot of these Aspects, but that, those kinds of rights did not really affect the racial division of labor. In other words, there is no right to work embedded in the Constitution.

That means that even though a group is enfranchised and able to participate in the political arena, even though there is integration and personal relations in the school system, that does not mean that equality is has been achieved. So I was impressed with the tremendous amount of wonderful literature on what’s called really a civil rights revolution in the North during the antebellum period and the struggle among Black communities throughout the North for equal rights.

But a lot of that literature ignores the issue of work, which of course is a key lived experience for almost everyone. And I think A significant factor that has to be considered whenever we talk about rights or equality in general

[00:12:40] Ben Wright: seems to have got this, uh, two lives of an American, you know, this, this life on paper, and then this life in public is labor history in particular, a good avenue into exploring this discrepancy.

[00:12:55] Jackie Jones: Yes, absolutely. And I think that’s why I wrote the book, that I was interested in seeing how this rhetoric of rights, this rhetoric of egalitarianism, translated into the shop floor or the workplace. And I found the, uh, uh, a contrast there, obviously, between what people were saying and what they were actually doing.

A good example here are these very courageous white abolitionists, William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Theodore Parker, men who really put their lives on the line. Uh, Boston overall was very hostile to abolitionism before the war. These are men who put their lives on the line, and yet, Again, they were not willing to go so far as to call for integrated work sites and why was that?

I think it was because they were afraid that such a call would have aggravate potential donors to the anti slavery cause, employers who worried about aggravating their workers, their white workers. Uh, in other words, there were all, there would be all sorts of cascading effects for white abolitionists if they turned their attention to black workers in Boston at the time.

And I know that William Lloyd Garrison and others really worried about fundraising and really worried about keeping the support of very wealthy men in Boston and did not want to ruffle their feathers by asking or demanding they do something that they would probably have refused to do in any case, and that is integrate their own labor forces.

[00:14:50] Ben Wright: Um, a question a little bit out of left field here. One of the questions your book raises is, is the Boston experience. And obviously there’s a contrast with the Southern states. Uh, but there seems to be lots of things in common as well. I’m thinking about sort of the fight for populism in the South, for example.

There is this progressive labor mentality and this regressive racial mentality, but you’re seeing a similar thing going on in the North.

[00:15:19] Jackie Jones: Yes, I mean, one of the great ironies I discovered was the fact that many of these freedom seekers, many of these fugitives from slavery in the antebellum period were skilled workers who came north but couldn’t find jobs commensurate with their skills in Boston or in Massachusetts.

Frederick Douglass was a skilled ship caulker. He became a hod carrier and a tender, which is kind of a catch all term for custodian, messenger. Throughout the book, I follow Peter Randolph. who was formerly enslaved in Virginia, a skilled blacksmith who became a tender in Boston and worked at menial jobs until he was ordained as a Baptist preacher.

So there is, that fact that skilled black workers were not able to find a customer base among whites, and also they had left the South, of course, without their tools, without the tools of their trade. So Boston essentially was a post emancipation society. Really, slavery was eliminated, uh, because of the Constitution of 1780.

It was a gradual process. But after the 1790s or so, there were no enslaved people in Massachusetts, but, and this is again a prelude, uh, to what happens in the post emancipation South, there, uh, emerges an ideology of black people, they’re unable to work machines. They’re unable to become factory operatives.

They’re unable to work as professionals. They’re condemned to menial labor because that is what they are supposedly naturally suited for. And this ideology of Black inferiority as it relates to labor patterns, again, is similar to what we’ll find in the South in the late 19th century. So, yeah, if we look at Boston not as this beacon of progressivism as much as a post emancipation society that works against Black equality, we do see similarities with the post Civil War South.

[00:17:59] Ben Wright: One of the things you said there that I want to touch upon briefly, there’s this aspect to racism. Which is almost sort of reptilianly transactional, who gets the stuff, who gets the job. And then you’ve got this aspect which is about the stories people tell themselves. Like people can’t use machines and so on and so forth.

So you’ve got this cultural aspect, you’ve got this sort of hard economic aspect. How do you, as a historian, think about the nature of racism? Does it have an essence, or is it just merely a set of social dynamics, um, or is there something that’s greater than the sum of its parts about it?

[00:18:39] Jackie Jones: Well, I don’t think it has an essence, really.

I think we have to start with a particular place in a particular time and see how jobs get parceled out. And we’ll find that the racial division of labor changes depending on the place and time we’re talking about. I wrote a whole book about this, actually, called American Work, Four Centuries of Black and White Labor.

And I found that ideologies, uh, what Black, white, black and white men and women can do arise, uh, in particular circumstances to justify the social division of labor. So for instance, in the late 19th century, there was an idea among textile mill owners in the South that black people were incapable of running textile machinery.

They were incapable of serving as Now, that would have surprised the grandfathers of these textile mill owners who used enslaved workers a lot in antebellum mills. But what we find in the late 19th century is this idea, well, we’ve got to limit mill work. to whites because it’s much better than working as sharecroppers on the countryside.

So if we’re going to favor white people and still keep a very exploitative labor system in play, we’re going to be able to drain some white people off the countryside into the mill villages, give them work in the factories, but we’re going to exclude black Men and women in the process. So you’re right.

It’s, it’s all very calculated. I feel, um, and these racial ideologies are very malleable. They’re very fluent and they do arise in response to certain circumstances. And I would argue that those circumstances are usually the demand for cheap. Labor

[00:20:44] Ben Wright: now, European countries are, um, Western European countries in particular, uh, during this period, 1850 to 1900 are embarking on this, uh, incredibly damaging colonial enterprise that America sort of has sort of at the time and to an extent now sees itself as proudly outside of, are we able to think about it?

The plight of black Americans at this time as sort of a form of colonialism that America is imposing upon a part of itself.

[00:21:17] Jackie Jones: Well certainly there are aspects of colonialism. If we look at the vast. Plantations, the industrial style plantations of the late 19th century South, and the fact that some of those plantations and the lumber industries of Appalachia were owned by Northern investors who are seeking, of course, the cheapest labor possible and also feeding into this process.

Thank you. Uh, the pseudo scientific notions of race, that is, black inferiority. There has been really interesting work done, yes, on black sharecroppers and tenant farmers in the Post Civil War South and similarities in their play compared to colonized peoples in Africa at the same time. I mean, the demand is for a resource, a staple crop and the whole idea is to keep labor costs as low as possible and to keep the state whether it’s a state government or a national government from interfering to make, um, those labor costs greater than they currently are.

So there, yeah, there’s certainly some similarities, you know, I think, uh, Booker T. Washington was, um, imported by, uh, some of the German colonies in Africa to help, uh, establish black agricultural. workers there. Um, you know, how do you get these folks to work without turning to overt violence, uh, at the time?

So, yeah, there are all sorts of interesting parallels to be made there.

[00:23:20] Ben Wright: Well, I suppose one thing we haven’t covered, which I think we’ll cover in closing, is your book is reconstructing a whole chapter of Black life. How do you go about that from a source perspective?

[00:23:36] Jackie Jones: Well, certainly I had to be creative about this, but I was also very fortunate that all the really, uh, wonderful, uh, and abundant sources online that helped me and the online sources were especially helpful because many of them are searchable.

So I use several databases of newspapers. At the time and all I had to do was plug in a term and see what came up. Obviously, I couldn’t read all these papers, but the fact that they’re online and digitized and searchable was really a tremendous help. I found all sorts of things online that I didn’t expect.

For instance, the Boston City Council minutes are there. Unfortunately, they’re handwritten and not searchable. But, uh, it was really wonderful to be ha to have them so accessible. And there were all sorts of court cases and pamphlets, autobiographies, memoirs, that I discovered online that were really illuminating.

So, uh, I would say that the newspapers were really very helpful when it came to reconstructing Black life in Boston. And just one example, the rendition trial of Anthony Burns, a fugitive from Richmond who came to Boston in 1854, that proceeding involved testimony from a man named William Jones who showed Burns around the city when he first arrived and took Burns with him when he looked for work.

So that was really a key to the dynamics of casual labor in the city, how these black men went from one place to another in the course of a day looking for an hour of work or looking for two hours if they were lucky, a day’s work. So part of what was looking at this material creatively, the police records gave me insight into Joseph Clash and his dance hall in the North End.

He was an entrepreneur of some renown in Boston. So yeah, the sources were really rich once I dug into them.

[00:26:04] Ben Wright: And of course, one of the things you allude to there, one of the things you find is, despite this casually cruel system in place, there are black men and women who find a way.

[00:26:16] Jackie Jones: Yes, and that’s a significant part of the story too, because there were well to do black men and women.

And, uh, Christiana, Madame Carteau, who called herself a hair doctoress, Robert Morris, a very successful attorney who represented black and white clients. J. B. Smith, who was a popular caterer for whites in the city, John Bailey owned a gymnasium patronized by whites, uh, these men and women, and I include, uh, the Reverend Lever Leonard Grimes, pastor of Twelfth Baptist Church, and there is, you know, really very well known in the community and relatively successful.

Uh, at the, at the other end, of course, is what I call the underground commons, uh, the sex workers, the, uh, Pimps, uh, who made a living, uh, pickpockets made a living, uh, in the illegal ways. And one of my favorite stories is the story of the police officer who one night in Boston stopped a black man who had a burlap.

bag on his shoulder, uh, told him to put the bag down on the ground and notice that the bag was squirming. It turned out it had rats in it. This was a man who collected rats from stables and then sold them to the rat pits, uh, these, uh, You know, uh, this, this sort of sport, so called, where, uh, men bet on how long it would take a dog in a pit to kill a certain number of rats.

In any case, this rat collector said he had made five dollars that night, which was quite a substantial sum, and testified to his own resourcefulness, I thought.

[00:28:06] Ben Wright: That’s fascinating. Um, and disturbing all at once. Um, Jackie, thank you so much for joining us today. We really appreciate it.

[00:28:15] Jackie Jones: Oh, it was my pleasure.

Thank you, Ben.

[00:28:19] Ben Wright: 15 Minute History is produced at the University of Texas at Austin in partnership with Not Even Past and Hemispheres in the College of Liberal Arts. It is recorded at the Lates Development Studio. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, follow us on social media, and visit our website for more information and resources.

See y’all next week.