Hey, it’s Jeff Green, an Equality reporter based in Detroit. This week, I want to tell you about a data project that uncovered some surprising insights into what companies did in the year after the 2020 Black Lives Matters protests. But first…

After three years of tracking data, my colleagues and I were finally able to present a picture of how hiring changed inside S&P 100 companies in the wake of the 2020 murder of George Floyd. For those who say that more diversity is good for corporate America, the one-year snapshot from 2020 to 2021 was encouraging: Some 94% of the total 328,000 workers added that year were people of color. That’s according to reports submitted by 88 companies that provided sufficient data.