The Interview : Jacqueline Jones

Rachna Singh, Editor, The Wise Owl talks to Jacqueline Jones, 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 (2023) which won the Pulitzer Prize 2024 and Goddess of Anarchy: The Life and Times of Lucy Parsons (2017). She is also the author of A Dreadful Deceit: The Myth of Race from the Colonial Era to Obama’s America (2013). That book and Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work and the Family from Slavery to the Present were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize; Labor of Love won the Bancroft Prize for 1986. Other works include Saving Savannah: The City and the Civil War, 1854-1872 (2008) and many others. She has won numerous grants and awards, including a MacArthur Fellowship (1999-2004). She was President of the American Historical Association in 2021. She is currently Emerita Professor at the University of Texas at Austin.

Thank you, Jacqueline, for taking time out of your busy schedule to talk with The Wise Owl.

RS: Your Pulitzer-winning book No Right to an Honest Living paints a vivid portrait of Black workers in Civil War-era Boston—challenging myths about the North’s racial tolerance. What initially drew you to Boston as a site of study, and how do you see this city’s historical racial dynamics shaping or reflecting broader national labor trends today? In what ways does the book speak to the continued marginalization of Black workers in modern American society?

JJ: In the late antebellum period, Boston had (and still has today) a reputation as a site of militant abolitionism. More generally, by 1860, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts seemed enlightened by the standards of the day, when we consider the commonwealth’s support for Black (male) suffrage, integrated public schools, and intermarriage. I was interested to see if Black workers had economic opportunities commensurate with those of their white counterparts—in other words, did the rhetoric and actions of anti-slavery activists reveal or affect the status of Black workers in any meaningful way? What I found was that white abolitionists’ eloquence and physical courage did not tell us much about the social division of labor in the city; Black men and women continued to toil at ill-paid menial jobs, with little chance for advancement or better pay.  Waves of immigrants displaced Black men from their jobs as barbers, stable hands, and servants. Black women remained confined to the jobs of laundress or domestic servant.  Black abolitionists pointed out that white anti-slavery activists cared more about the plight of enslaved Southerners than about the welfare of their Black neighbors.  Through the years, the fact that most Black workers could not afford to buy their own homes meant that they would lack the intergenerational real-estate assets claimed by many white families.

RS:  Across your seminal works—from Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow to American Work—you’ve consistently examined the intertwined histories of labor, race, and gender. How have your perspectives on these relationships evolved over time, particularly in light resurgence of organized labor in the U.S.?

JJ: Until well into the twentieth century, at least, many U. S. labor unions excluded white women and members of minorities, whether Chinese immigrants or native-born African Americans. In mid-nineteenth-century Boston, White women abandoned domestic service and entered textile and shoe factories, where they could earn a wage and have certain set (albeit extremely long) hours.  In contrast, domestic servants, especially those who lived in their employers’ home, remained on call twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and at times received compensation in the form of leftover food or cast-off clothing only.  Employers in general were skillful in manipulating the fears of their workers; for example, during the Civil War, Boston’s white wage-earners feared that emancipated Black men and women would migrate north and flood the city’s labor market.  Employers amplified these fears in an effort to discourage strikes and other kinds of labor actions.  In my research I did find evidence that one union at least, the typographers, called for admitting Blacks and women into the labor movement in general, to ward off threats of strike breakers among these groups.  Most unions, however, exploited and encouraged their members’ anti-women, anti-Black, and anti-immigrant prejudices.  Today, Black people are integral members and officers of many distinct kinds of unions, although only about one out of ten wage-earners belongs to a union.

RS: In A Dreadful Deceit, you dismantle the notion of race as a biological reality and instead reveal it as a powerful, enduring social fiction. Could you share how researching this book shaped or reshaped your own understanding of race in American history—and how you see this “myth” continuing to influence policy, identity, and societal structures in the 21st century?

JJ: I came to see that the idea of “race”—that human beings can be categorized into discrete groupings and that those groupings can be ranked hierarchically—is actually a kind of political strategy.  By that I mean that people who possessed or aspired to power could cite arbitrary distinctions such as hair texture or skin color to exploit or marginalize certain groups.  Enslavers, employers of sharecroppers, and ambitious politicians could rationalize the subordination of, or assaults upon, people of color by arguing that “racial’ distinctions were “natural” and revealing of an inferior group temperament, culture, or intelligence.  I found that throughout American history, white employers invoked “race” to justify a specific social division of labor.  However, that division was neither static nor universal; particular racial ideologies always reflected particular times and places.  I shall just note that it is common for people to describe American slavery in “racial” terms.  Slavery was a legal, not a “racial,” institution; for example, the pervasive sexual attacks upon enslaved women by white men meant that many enslaved people had white forebears.  The word “race” is ubiquitous in our present-day vocabulary, a fact that obscures the history and misguided use of the term.

RS:  Goddess of Anarchy introduces readers to the complex and often controversial life of Lucy Parsons—a radical activist of colour with a contested heritage and a fiery commitment to revolutionary change. What drew you to her story, and what challenges did you face in piecing together a narrative about someone whose identity and personal life were shrouded in myth, secrecy, and erasure?

JJ:  I was intrigued by the story of Parsons and wanted to see whether or not newly digitized sources could reveal more of her story than was apparent several decades ago.  When she embarked on her first national speaking tour, in the fall of 1886 to raise money for the legal defense of her husband and the other (wrongly) convicted Haymarket men, she began to claim she was the daughter of a Mexican man and Indigenous woman.  By using online resources such as newspapers, I was able to learn that she was in fact born to an enslaved woman in Virginia in 1851.  An article in a St. Louis newspaper from 1886 included a great deal of information about her that I was able to confirm with the use of other sources such as census data.  She was light-skinned, and many white observers considered her to be exotic, of indeterminate heritage, so she was able to present herself as Mexican-Indian.  I believe she thought she would gain more credibility and a larger following if she hid her origins as a formerly enslaved woman.  She was a powerful orator, and of course we lack any recordings of her speeches, which helps to explain why many people today have never heard of her.  In her time, however, she was quite famous, or notorious-- a household name even.

RS: Your work includes sweeping scholarly histories as well as more personal reflections, like Creek Walking, which chronicles your childhood in 1950s Delaware. How do you navigate the shift in tone, methodology, and voice when writing history from the outside in, as a scholar, versus from the inside out, as a participant or observer? What do these different genres allow you to explore that traditional academic history might not?

JJ: Over the years I have tried to make my work accessible to different audiences—a textbook for college undergraduates; op-eds for newspaper readers; monographs for scholars as well as a general audience; the memoir of my childhood, Creek Walking for my two daughters.   I think all historians aspire to a larger audience outside the academy, and as a group we seek to avoid the jargon that weighs down the studies of scholars in other disciplines.  Many non-historians love history, whether they encounter it in Hollywood movies or documentary films, Broadway plays, family genealogies, stories handed down by their grandparents, biographies, or historical fiction.  As historians reach larger and larger audiences, they encounter resistance from groups and individuals who prefer fiction over fact, myth over truth, when it comes to chronicling our nation’s past.  I have no doubt though that most people are eager to learn a full, accurate history of the United States.

RS: As a pioneer in the fields of labour and African American history, how do you assess the current state of scholarship in these areas? What emerging questions or underexplored archives do you believe historians should turn to next, especially when addressing structural inequality, or the politics of underemployment?

JJ: First, I would push back on the notion that I was a “pioneer” in either Black history or labor history.  When I wrote Labor of Love (1985), I was drawing on the work of Angela Davis (“The Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves,” 1971) and Herbert Gutman (The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1976).  Around that time Deborah Gray White and Paula Giddings were writing about the history of Black women.  And of course a number of labor historians were exploring the role of unions in organizing segments of the white laboring classes.  Today the historiography in these fields is incredibly rich, with researchers continuing to look at the history of labor and African Americans from a kaleidoscope of perspectives. As members of a particular discipline, we historians are welcoming of all kinds of topics and time periods, and we tend to know good history when we see it, based on the documentation presented by the author.  We follow the evidence wherever it might take us.

RS: You’ve written works that are both academically rigorous and widely accessible to general audiences—earning acclaim from both scholars and literary juries. What advice would you offer to emerging historians or writers who aim to produce compelling, socially relevant history without sacrificing scholarly depth? How important is it for historians today to engage with public discourse?

JJ: As historians we value all kinds of approaches (within the guidelines of the discipline, of course!)  I would say to younger scholars first of all, choose a topic where the sources are there and one that you feel intensely interested in (“passionate” is an overused word).  You’re going to need that interest to sustain you over the long haul, when things get rough during researching and/or writing. Then tell your own story without other scholars looking over your shoulder, so to speak.  In other words, put the historiography behind you (or in your footnotes) and craft your narrative in your own way.  Also, for a general audience, do not assume your readers already know a lot of American history.  It goes without saying that good history is not always “relevant” to critical issues of today; one need not address current controversies to produce an excellent narrative about the past.

RS: Education features prominently in your earlier work, such as Soldiers of Light and Love, and remains a recurring theme in your analysis of post-emancipation Black life. How have you seen education function historically as both a tool of liberation and control in African American communities? What parallels do you see between Reconstruction-era educational struggles and today’s debates over curriculum, access, and educational equity?

JJ: As a graduate student I studied with Carl Kaestle, who had been a student of Lawrence Cremin, both of them distinguished historians of education.  The public school ideal was just that—the ideal of children from all groups learning together in public schools in order to produce an informed and virtuous citizenry.  We have never achieved that ideal, mainly because the resources schools enjoy reflect the communities in which they are situated; those kinds of glaring inequalities mock the notion of an education “common” to all children.  In the post-Civil War South, Black schools were sites of pride and the acquisition of literacy schools within a wider white culture that had criminalized Black learning under slavery.  At the same time, literacy among freed people was not sufficient to allow them to overcome poverty, landlessness, and state-sponsored violence.  So we have to have a nuanced views of what schools can or cannot accomplish.  Today an influential segment of the population would like to destroy the public system altogether in favor of privately run institutions where the owners seek to make money and sectarian schools that promote a specific religion.  However, it is still true that as a society, we have a collective stake in providing all children with a basic, excellent education in schools where they can all learn together.

RS: Our readers would love to know what you are working on now. Could you share brief details of your new book or project.

JJ: The American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a learned society founded by John Adams and others in 1780, has commissioned me to write a new history of the group.  For many generations the Academy excluded white women and women and men of color. Yet over time it has kept alive the idea that the production of knowledge is a social good, an idea that is more relevant and necessary now than ever.

Thank you so much Jacqueline for talking with The Wise Owl. We wish you the best in all your literary and creative endeavours.