Black Protest Events In The Us 1994-2010: Issues, Campaigns And Trends

Abstract

This paper fills a major empirical gap in providing the first systematic data about US Black movement protests between the 1994 and 2010. There is a dearth of systematic information about the Black movement and Black protests between 1995 and its reemergence in Black Lives Matter in 2012. Using a new automated system, we identified 1017 events in 1049 news wire stories relevant to Black protest between 1994 and 2010 from the Annotated English Gigaword file. These data provide insight into Black activism in the between 1994 and 2010 and identify themes that are salient for both the resurgence of the Black Lives Movement after 2012 and the rise of White supremacist movements. Over a third of all protest events are about policing, generally about police violence. Other major themes include direct struggles over White vs. Black symbolic representations and access to resources, including protests over Confederate symbols, abolition of affirmative action programs, and White supremacists. The 1995 Million Man March shows up as having a significant connection to subsequent mobilization, a relationship that is confirmed by historical accounts. A third of the protests are around a wide variety of other specific issues that will require more detailed classification. Time trends show active and rising Black mobilization in the 1990s through 2001 that was interrupted by the 9/11 terror attacks and not significantly resumed until 2006-7. Overall, most protests in this era appear to have been reacting against attacks on existing benefits rather than proactively seeking new benefits. Methodologically, we show the importance of maintaining information about both events and coverage of events and of identifying the relations between events using the concepts of campaign, master event, and subevent. NOTE: This is a draft paper based on a preliminary analysis of data. We are continuing to refine the analysis and revise the paper. Please check with us for the latest version if you wish to cite the paper. This is a wholesale revision of a 2017 paper based on what turned out to be only a subset of the events in the newswire stories, due to an error in the selection of stories fed into the MPEDS classifier.

Assessing the Explanatory Power of Social Movement Theories across the Life Course of the Civil Rights Movement

“…The limited explanatory power of our models may be due to theoretical and methodological limitations of the approach we take in this article. While existing social movement theories are largely effective at explaining emergence, they are less effective for studying decline (Davenport 2014; Santoro and Fitzpatrick 2015) and perhaps worse at studying the “doldrums” (Oliver, Hanna, and Lim 2019; Taylor 1989). This may be because movements that are active during protest waves build on previous actions (Koopmans 2004; Tarrow 1998), and such responsiveness makes them conducive for multidecade time-series regressions (often using aggregated counts) like the ones presented here.…”

Resisting Repression: The Black Lives Movement in Context

“…Unpunished police violence was also the precipitant for the major riots/insurrections in Miami in 1980 and Los Angeles in 1992. About a third of the Black protest events described in news wire stories concerned unfair policing, including widely covered protests about police killings in New York in the 1990s and again in 2006, and protests and riots after police killings in Cincinnati in 2001and Oakland 2009(Oliver, Hanna, and Lim 2019.…”

“…Taylor (2016 and Fletcher and Rogers (2014) explicitly state that the attack dissipated the Radical Black Congress and Taylor stresses that poll data showed that Blacks had even higher support for profiling Arabs than Whites. Protest event data shows a steep drop in Black protests after 9/11 (Oliver, Hanna, and Lim 2019).…”

“…Black Americans saw racial injustice in the mismanagement of the flooding in New Orleans after hurricane Katrina in 2005 and in the failure to rebuild housing in Black areas of the city. Disruptive protests received extensive news coverage about a police killing in New York in 2006 (Oliver, Hanna, and Lim 2019). In 2007 there was an extensive on-line mobilization organized by ColorOfChange.org over an incident in Jena, Louisiana.…”

“…The noose apparently was in retaliation for the Black students' sitting in an area traditionally reserved for Whites. The online campaign culminated in a march of 20,000 in Jena with numerous coordinated sympathy rallies around the country and a wave of follow-up protests calling for more punishment of noose-hanging and other hate crimes (Oliver, Hanna, and Lim 2019).…”