The Everyday Repertoire: Computational Analysis of Political Action in the Black Press, 1905–1929

• In Event: Comparative-Historical Sociology and Computational Social Science

Abstract

Historical accounts of Black political action in the early twentieth century center on landmark episodes and their most visible leaders, leaving the routine landscape of political life unmapped. We construct a new digital archive of 43 Black newspapers published between 1905 and 1929, comprising 20,911 issues and 157,506 pages drawn primarily from the Library of Congress, and apply a computational pipeline combining vision-language model OCR with LLM-based content analysis to code political actions on two dimensions: form and issue. From a sample of 2,500 front pages, we identify 11,482 actions and find a political world far more organizationally dense and culturally oriented than canonical narratives suggest. Public advocacy and institution-building, not protest or legal challenge, dominate the repertoire; political representation and cultural-symbolic claims, not racial violence, dominate the issue landscape. These patterns hold across nationally influential papers and small-town weeklies alike, suggesting a broadly shared political culture rather than a movement radiating from a few centers. Applied to a previously unsearchable archive, computational methods reveal not new episodes but a new picture of how political life was distributed across dozens of Black communities over a quarter century. By converting image-based newspaper archives into structured event data, this approach enables comparative-historical analysis of political repertoires across communities, regions, and periods previously inaccessible to systematic study.

Authors

• Neal Caren, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill

• Braxton Brewington, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill

• Marty Kennedy, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill