Sat Dec 12 · 7:00pm
Mill Talk: Why Were There No Black Machine Operatives in 19th Century New England Textile Mills?
Jacqueline Jones, Professor of History Emerita at the University of Texas at Austin, asks why antebellum New England textile mills hired only white workers when Southern mills ran on enslaved operatives, and locates the answer in Boston's potential white allies, including abolitionists and labor activists, who never pressed for Black workers' access to wage labor. Her No Right to an Honest Living won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for History.