Super excited that “The Green Books and the Geography of Segregation in Public Accommodations” with @drlisadcook @MaggieECJones and David Rose is out as an @nberpubs working paper today!
nber.org/papers/w26819?…
nber.org/papers/w26819?…
This paper describes the work we’ve been doing with the Negro Motorists Greenbooks, which were published from the late 1930s until the Civil Rights Act of 1964. We are very excited that we can talk about some of the work we’ve been doing with the Green Books! 
Greenbooks helped black people navigate a treacherous environment. Leveraging the network of black postal workers, the Greenbooks complied a national directory of businesses where black people could be treated like...people. Say, a gas station you could use the restroom at.
Why are Greenbooks important? Because we have very little historical evidence on public accommodations. We know that racial discrimination was widespread, but we know very little about variation in places of equal access public accommodation. This is historically important.
We have painstakingly manually digitized the Greenbooks. This is well over 40,000 establishment-years in the full data set. We couldn’t use algorithms since they would misrecord a large number of establishments, but the upside is that we know this data really, really well
We also geocoded (longitude and latitude) each establishment in the Greenbooks. We were able to precisely locate around 90% of these establishments! That’s no small feat considering that the vast majority are no longer in operation.
So what can we learn from the Greenbooks? First, read the paper! But here I’ll summarize a few interesting things in the paper. If you look over time, you see a very curious trend in the number of establishments listed in the Greenbooks! There’s a large drop in 1955.
What’s going on? First, we look by type of business and find that all business types decline dramatically at 1955 other than formal accommodations (hotels). Did these other business types just disappear?
We found that the nature of Greenbooks changed. Before 1955 they were more of a directory (similar to a phone book) listing businesses and some advertised. After 1955, the businesses in the Greenbooks were much more likely to advertise. This implies a change in the business model
This also tells us that you cannot use the Greenbooks as a time series of establishments. The nature of the Greenbooks changes over time. This is one (large) benefit of knowing the data well.
We also look at is the location of Greenbooks within urban areas. We overlay the redlining maps with the Greenbook locations by city. Below is an example of New York City. As you can see, Greenbook businesses are in the lowest graded neighborhoods.
We estimate a number of correlations of the Greenbooks with local social and economic features at the county level. Interestingly, we find Greenbooks are positively related to racial segregation measures and the number of confederate symbols.
At the state level, we look at the relationship between Greenbooks and the number of anti-discriminatory and pro-discriminatory laws. We find that the slopes are indeed different. More anti-discriminatory laws are more strongly correlated with Greenbooks.
There is so much more in the paper! Right now, we’re working on a number of extensions, primarily centered around economic reasons for increasing non-discriminatory public accommodations before the Civil Rights Act of 1964. These results will be coming to a seminar near you soon!
And (yay!) @DavidRo_se is on twitter!
