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Nelson Ouellet, Practical Radicalism and the Great Migration: The Cultural Geography of the Scott Newspaper Syndicate, Journal of American History, Volume 111, Issue 2, September 2024, Page 378, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jaae151
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The Great Migration of African Americans has long been viewed as a silent protest. Along with his The Grapevine of the Black South: The Scott Newspaper Syndicate in the Generation before the Civil Rights Movement (2018), Thomas Aiello's Practical Radicalism and the Great Migration broadens this understanding. By focusing on a Black newspaper syndicate trying to expand from its Atlanta, Georgia, base during the Great Depression, he shows that the reach of the syndicate's “practical radicalism” extended far beyond the limits of a southern network. Understanding the vulnerability of a business enterprise under constant threat of racial violence, the leaders of the Scott Newspaper Syndicate (Sns) developed a press model that, while foregoing direct confrontation with white people easily alarmed by denunciation of the Jim Crow society, deployed its militant tone selectively by reporting outside (nonlocal) news. As a survival strategy, this practical radicalism tied well with a silent protest that deprived the South of the means to retaliate against migrants already scattered across the nation's urban landscape.