Pamela Oliver
My research team just posted a working paper that compares Black newspapers and mainstream newswires in their coverage of Black American protest events. In this paper we are just trying to lay out the big patterns we see in the data so we can do more work to refine the
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Update: The latest version of this paper has a new title, updated numbers that include more events identified in the process of reviewing and cleaning the data, and a somewhat different emphasis, but the basic findings are much the same. The SocArXiv link will take you to the latest version
Read moreA sustained campaign throughout the 1990s and 2000s successfully opposed the execution of Mumia Abu-Jamal.
Read moreGeneral Background The events in Cincinnati were often referred to as the largest riot or rebellion since 1992 in Los Angeles and/or the largest riot or rebellion in Cincinnati since the 1960s. On Saturday April 7 2001, 19 year old Timothy Thomas was shot and killed while running away from
Read moreA narrative by Carl Sack about his experience during the 2001 Cincinnati protests. Carl wrote this narrative at the request of Pam Oliver, who had heard him describe these incidents. Carl is a White man who is now a PhD Geographer who is on the faculty of a community college. This
Read moreOur research project is using articles from mainstream newswires (as archived in the Linguistic Data Consortium’s Annotated English Gigaword) and Black newspapers to identify Black protest events in the 1990s and 2000s. This is an under-studied period in Black movement history. In this article we summarize the most newsworthy episodes
Read moreAlthough the “Million Youth March” is often referenced in later years as one of the examples of Black solidarity after the huge and inspiring Million Man and Million Woman marches, the reality was low attendance and a lot of conflict. After the success of the 1997 Million Woman March, older
Read moreNOTE: Since writing this blog post I have done more research and have written a short book that gives a somewhat different slant on some events and theoretical issues. There was a huge wave of Black protests in the wake of what came to be called the Jena Six case.
Read moreMost of the discussions of the Million Man March (MMM) have focused on interpretations of Louis Farrakhan’s ideology or about the meaning of the widespread Black support for the MMM for what it implied about what Black people thought about Farrakhan. Few have discussed the significance of the obvious: the
Read moreThe Million Woman March (MWM) was held in Philadelphia on October 25, 1997, nine days after the second anniversary of the Million Man March (MMM). Although crowd size estimates are always problematic, there were probably more people at the Million Woman March than the Million Man March. Unlike the Million
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