University of Notre Dame Public Relations and Information 317 Main Building Notre Dame, Indiana 46556-5602 (219) 631-7367 (219) 631-8212 fax

Director Dennis K. Moore Associate Director Dennis K. Brown Assistant Directors Cynthia Scott Day Michael O. Garvey

Note to the media: To contact the students or Professor Myers, call (219) 631-3839.

Four rioting studies by undergraduates at the University of Notre Dame have been accepted for presentation Wednesday-Friday (April 19-21) at the annual meeting of the Midwest Sociological Society in Chicago.

Under the direction of Daniel Myers, assistant professor of sociology, more than a dozen students are engaged in an intensive study of the racial riots in the United States in the 1960s and early 1970s. Undergraduate research is often little more that data compilation, but Myers says the students involved in his Notre Dame Research Workshop on Riots and Protests are "engaged in original thinking that is leading to new scholarship as well as a depth of learning rarely seen in typical classes or even in senior capstone research projects."

The four studies to be presented next week during regular (rather than student) sessions of the Midwest Sociological Society meeting are:

• "Frame Development and Alignment: Birmingham, Alabama, 1968," by junior Matthew Baggetta from Smithtown, N.Y.

• "The Societal and Institutional Causes of School Riots in the Late 1960s," by juniors Beth Kirvida from Center City, Minn., and Francisco Sanchez from El Paso, Texas.

• "The Contribution of Policing to Racial Rioting in the 1960s," by juniors Kimberly Berg from Glassboro, N.Y., and Anthony Perez from St. John, Ind.

• "The Benefits of Grassroots, Peaceful, and Youth-Led Initiatives in Curbing Violence" by senior Colleen Quinlan from Great Falls, Va.

The material was compiled from 1966-74 by Brandeis University's Lemberg Center for the Study of Violence and includes thousands of newspaper clippings, taped interviews, transcripts of interviews, and surveys, very little of which has been subjected to rigorous analysis.

The archive was nearly discarded in 1979 by Brandeis when an unknown individual associated with Manchester College interceded and had it stored at the northern Indiana school for almost 20 years.

Myers heard about the archive while in graduate school and spent two years trying to find it. No one at Brandeis knew its location, but Myers eventually followed a lead to a retired secretary who recalled the Manchester connection. Two months after joining the Notre Dame faculty in 1998, Myers finally located the material — ironically, just 90 miles southeast of Notre Dame in North Manchester, Ind.

Myers and his students are gathering and examining data from three primary components in the archive: