Race and Collective Violence, 1967-1972

University Of Notre Dame, Notre Dame IN

Investigators

Abstract

SES-0111217 Daniel J. Myers This grant will support the coding of data in the archives of the Lemberg Center for the Study of Violence. The Lemberg Center operated at Brandeis University from 1966-1974 and was a key site of research on the race-related civil disturbances of the 1960s. Since the center closed its doors and the prior director, John Spiegel, passed away, the archives of the center was presumed by many to have been discarded or lost. In early 1998, the main elements of the archive were re-discovered and other components have been located since then. The archive contains a wealth of previously unanalyzed data about the riots and promises greater understanding of the riots from a historical perspective and of collective violence and race relations more generally. In particular, the archives contain newspaper-based documentation of civil disorder events and interview tapes and transcripts. The archival data could potentially inform and significantly modify prior understandings of these particular riots and collective violence more generally. In particular, the more extensive data will provide for more accurate modeling of the economic and structural causal mechanisms that lead to rioting, a better understanding of the spread of collective violence via social diffusion processes, additional information about the methodological and substantive implications of media selection processes and media description bias, and more direct documentation of changing racial attitudes in response to the rioting. To lay the foundation for that research, it will be necessary to translate the newspaper event record into machine-readable format.