THE FIRST GENERATION OF AFRICAN AMERICAN PHDS IN ECONOMICS: 1921–1943
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper deals with the African Americans who gained PhDs in economics, from the first in 1921 until 1943, roughly the first generation of African Americans with doctorates in economics. All through their student and post-student lives, they faced barriers and limitations thrown up by racial discrimination, with sometimes disheartening results. The paper charts the paths they took to achieve their PhDs, their thesis topics, and descriptions of their later career contributions. Virtually all came to work on issues central to African American interests and civil rights issues in general. Their careers centered on HBCUs (historically Black colleges and universities) and African American organizations such as the National Urban League or NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), or were in government agencies—especially those concerned with wartime labor and production issues or with housing. They contributed not just to economics and economic policy but to the struggle for civil rights. The door to the economics profession had been essentially closed to Black people prior to 1920. This is the group that began to push that door open.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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".