Black-Friendly Businesses in Cities During the Civil Rights Era
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Quantitative analysis of Black business districts and evidence on the magnitude of social change leading up to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, in particular as it relates to the accessibility of public accommodations, is limited. We combine newly digitized data on the precise geocoded location of nearly 6, 000 Green Book establishments—public accommodations that were friendly towards African American clientele—across major urban areas with existing and new sources of data on social change to understand the dynamics of Black-friendly businesses within cities during the middle of the twentieth century. In doing so, we document a new set of facts. First, we show that the location and growth of Green Book establishments responded to economic forces. Second, we show that there was a large increase in the number of Green Book establishments in cities between 1939 and 1955. Third, for Green Book establishments located in cities for which the Home Owner’s Loan Corporation (HOLC) drew residential security maps, the vast majority (nearly 70 percent) were located in the lowest-grade, redlined neighborhoods. And finally, we show that 1950s urban renewal projects were related to the contraction of non-discriminatory businesses. Collectively, these facts suggest that more research on Black-owned and Black-friendly businesses is needed to fully understand the economics of urban change in the twentieth century.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
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 teacher head, 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".