Showing Agency on the Margins: African American Railway Workers in the South and Their Unions, 1917–1930
Bibliographic record
Abstract
During World War I and the 1920s, African American trainmen throughout the South took advantage of federal administrative bodies that had set anti-discrimination rules to challenge racist employers and white trainmen alike. After the war, white workers insisted that African Americans be relegated to porter jobs. White employers demanded that African American workers who continued to work as brakemen and flagmen, as they had during the war, accept lower wages for such skilled work than their white counterparts were paid. The federal government preferred to turn a blind eye to racial discrimination against African American workers in the period after federal control of the railways ended. Despite this concerted attack from all sides on their rights, unions of African American trainmen continued their fight, with some success, before federal administrative tribunals as well as the courts to retain skilled positions and receive the same pay as their white equivalents. Only the devastation of rail jobs in the 1930s largely destroyed the African American trainmen’s wartime gains.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.039 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".