ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to pierce the aura of inevitability by asking: what accounts for shifts in the issue content of the congressional Black agenda? It answers the question by using Proquest's Historical Black Newspaper database to place Black civil rights issues within their proper historical contexts. The chapter provides a brief review of the relevant literature. It explains the basic data that are used to construct the narrative. The chapter tells two distinct narratives about lynching and poll taxes. It synthesizes insights based on both cases. The chapter begins of a much larger quantitative study of Black agenda setting in Congress. That project examines every Black issue bill introduced in Congress from 1947 to 2002. The chapter focuses on the origins of two of those issues: anti-lynching bills and bills abolishing poll taxes. It conducts searches for these two issues using the database of Historical Black Newspapers provided by ProQuest.
