Black protest Events in the US 1994-2010: Issues, Campaigns and Trends

• In Event: 1254 - The Evolution of Social Movements

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 in 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 seems to inspire subsequent mobilization, a relationship supported by qualitative 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 then 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.

Authors

• Pamela E. Oliver, University of Wisconsin, Madison

• Alex Hanna, Google

• Chaeyoon Lim, University of Wisconsin-Madison