First off I loved the narration! It was wonderful! I really learned a lot from this book. I consider myself to be pretty woke but I didn't know a lot of this social history. It is both black history and labor movement history. I was here looking up old news articles to enhance my new knowledge. It was great!

This audiobook was made available for me to listen to and review by Jacqueline Jones, Dreamscape Media, and NetGalley.

This was excellent, respectful, knowledgeable, well-sourced and interesting. It mostly avoids focusing on the more harrowing aspects of slavery in the Antebellum period. I'd rate this as low as far as slavery trauma focus. Though this does focus on segregation and racism in Boston and the wider Northern states. Perhaps in terms of trauma, this is closer to reading about the Civil Rights Movement than many texts that deal with chattel slavery. I add this to say: don't shy away from this for fear of trauma. That's not the tone or focus.

The main subject matter and focus of this is Black folks opportunities and everyday lives in Boston in this era. This takes specific individuals and follows their lives and includes some generational information when available. This explores the opportunities available in employment, housing and personal lives. So this includes marriages, births, relocating even outside of Boston and what the records reveal about how this person ended their days. This focuses on the basic struggle for even free Black folks during the antebellum era. It's very in depth and fascinating. Often the history of this period tends to focus on the few famous Black individuals but while this did include them, the focus was primarily on regular folks struggles.
This highlighted the differences that Black women faced in finding and maintaining freedom and affording to live. This was a hard and harrowing life for the vast majority of folks. Even more well known figures like Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman really struggled to survive in the available economy.
I was really enlightened at the struggle between the established Black Boston community and the immigrant Irish community. Irish folks attacked established Black communities and accused them of taking their jobs and housing. It was wild. I forever think Irish Americans badly bungled this, imagine the world we would all live in if Irish Americans had made common cause with Black Americans rather than focus on whiteness.

I really liked that this focused on and gave examples of the hypocrisy in white liberals/abolitionists of this era. I mean its historically focused but also relevant today. Many wealthy white liberal will march for Black Lives Matter but only so long as those lives stay in their respective red-line restricted communities. This focuses on the fact that white abolitionists were overwhelmingly anti-Black and held very troubling views of Black folks. This isn't a view of white abolitionists that we often see presented this clearly.

White abolitionists were largely in control of the funds raised to help formerly enslaved Black folks, whether escapees or post civil war. They seemed to operate from a fear that Black folks were inherently lazy and needed to be 'encouraged' to work hard. So almost the same view that enslavers held of Black folks. Their policy was to give funds to aid escape but nothing to help formerly enslaved folks settle in a new place without family. In effect their attitude reminded me of today's pro-lifers. Pro-life/anti-abortionists are obsessed with halting abortion but don't want to feed, clothe or house these unplanned babies they insisted be born. If you consider the base wealth of the major white abolitionists, their hypocrisy is glaring. It's the historical version of Kim Kardashian's empty-headed 'Nobody wants to work anymore' nonsense.

I was appalled at the bootstrap rhetoric employed by white abolitionists post civil war. At the same time these same white abolitionists largely refused to employ Black folks in their businesses. They'd hire a few favored folks in the their home but they refused to integrate their businesses. Instead the white abolitionists overly focused on Black folks willingness to work. As if enslaved people were taken care of and not exploited. It's frustrating because historically white women really struggled post civil war and that was behind many of the Jim & Jane Crow era laws requiring Black women to work outside of the home. There were laws forcing Black women into domestic labor because white women were unprepared to care for their own homes, families and children. As enslaved peoples, Black folks had been providing enough labor to provide for themselves and to enrich an entire white demographic/community/country and enrich Europe in the process. So clearly they could provide just fine for themselves as they had been since they 'arrived' in the colonies.

This also does an excellent job pointing out what would today be termed 'respectability politics' which was how some Black folks responded, and continue to respond, to racist and eugenicist views common in US society. This behavior isn't directly called out nor a focus of the book but it is included. This is important because just like the Jim & Jane Crow era racist beliefs that still plague our nation, this also works to increase racism and oppression. Black folks don't need to prove anything to be worthy of basic humanity. This is just a function of internalized racism.

This audiobook is narrated by Leon Nixon. Leon does an excellent job keeping the narrative interesting and from feeling like a very long history lecture. I pretty much binged this and my attention never waivered.

Thank you to Jacqueline Jones, Dreamscape Media, and NetGalley for the opportunity to listen to and review this audiobook. All opinions and viewpoints expressed in this review are my own.