The state that I have chosen to focus on is West Virginia. Prior to 9/11, there was one terror attack in the state which occurred in the on the campus of Bluefield State College in 1968. Bluefield was historically a black college until Brown V Board of Education allowed more opportunities for top black students. At the same time, white veterans were coming back from Korea and wanted to go to college at inexpensive schools like Bluefield State College. By the mid-1960s, the school population was only half black. The college then hired a white President who proceeded to hire 23 faculty members who were all white. Race tensions boiled over when a bomb ripped through the campus gym. It was over Thanksgiving break so no one was injured. In response, the school closed down the dorms. The landlords that owned the apartment buildings surrounding the school refused to rent to black students so they were forced to leave school as they had no place to live. Bluefield State College is now known as having the highest percentage of white students for any historically black college (Meraji and Demby 2013).
My first data visualization shows terrorism by country. It counts the number of terror events in each country and the size of the circle is based on how many terror attacks have happened there. It is not adjusted per 100,000 people living in the country but if it was it would likely be an even more dramatic chart. The countries with the most terror events, Iraq, Turkey, Peru, Afghanistan do not have particularly large populations. So their terror events per 100,000 would be extremely high. We talked about what defines a terror attack in class. We concluded that it requires three things:
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- A sub-national actor
- Property Damage
- Political motive
My second visualization was a bar chart of the different targets and methods used. It counts the total number of terror attacks on different targets and then separates those attacks by the method they used. The most common target is private citizens and property. The most common method is bombing/explosion. My next visualization is a map of all the terror attacks in the United States from 1970 to 2017. There is a dot for each event and its colored based on the weapon used. By far the most common weapon used for terror attacks in the United States is explosives. The map does a good job of showing just how many terror events there are. The size of the circle of the terror event is the same for every one. Making the size of the circle dependent on the number of fatalities or the number wounded or some other factor seemed too dark. My final visualization is a map of terror events in my chosen state of West Virginia. Fortunately, there have only been two terror events from 1970-2017(Global Terrorism Database).
References
Information on more than 180,000 Terrorist Attacks. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.start.umd.edu/gtd/
Meraji, S. M., & Demby, G. (2013, October 18). The Whitest Historically Black College In America. Retrieved from https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/10/18/236345546/the-whitest-historically-black-college-in-america