In the University of Chicago alumni magazine, there's an article in the March-April issue titled In the black, about a woman who spent a year "trying to patronize only black-owned businesses, most of which they have never patronized before."

This is the passage that leaped out at me when I first glanced at the article:

Yet to her surprise it took hours of research - checking black business directories online, calling local chambers of commerce, and finally phoning dollar stores individually - to find the only black-owned one in Chicago: the mellifluously named God First, God Last, God Always, Dollar And Up General Store.

There is no black-owned Athlete's Foot or Church's Chicken, Anderson discovered, though these stores also are common in black neighborhoods. And African American businesses tend to be either high-or low-end, with nothing in the middle: there's no black-owned Macy's, Sears, or Target. So John, who needs conservative clothing for his job as a financial adviser, spent 2009 wearing bespoke button-down shirts from a black-owned franchise of J. Hilburn, with dollar-store undershirts underneath.

The article also touches upon self-identification, Cuban-on-black racism, backlash, psychotic commenters, and the closing of the lone black-owned grocery store in Illinois (aka black-on-black racism: the owner reportedly believes that Experiment-related attention may have driven away African American customers who hadn't realized the store was black-owned).

There's a website about the Experiment. I went to it mainly to look at the "favorite finds" list mentioned in the article, but there no longer seems to be a live version of it.