Capturing Black Sentiment across the 20th Century

• In Event: 2429 - Open Refereed Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable 100min: Roundtable 3

Abstract

Studying the black struggle and social movements in American history during specific periods via the use of text mining is one way to better understand opposition to the majority culture. This study focuses on social mood from the lens of the Black population over the last century from existing text sources. The purpose of this study is to find out the overall sentiment or polarity of public opinions from the Black community in the U.S. Text mining will be performed utilizing articles and opinion pieces such as “Letters to the Editor” from The Crisis magazine to determine sentiment that is expressed by public readers of the publication. The argument is that, the sentiment captured by the text of The Crisis will be an adequate proxy of the social mood of the Black population at large. This is a reasonable proxy since The Crisis had an extensive national audience and articles were written to reflect the concerns and sensibilities of the Black population nationwide. A graphical analysis was conducted to plot the negative sentiment values which determine patterns and key peaks. Results, conclusions, and limitations will be discussed.

Keywords: Black Americans, Social Movements, Sentiment, Text Mining

Authors

• Giselle Greenidge, Northwest Missouri State University

• Bernard Hurtault, University of Southern Mississippi