The Grapevine of the Black South: The Scott Newspaper Syndicate in the Generation before the Civil Rights Movement (Print Culture in the South Ser.)

In the summer of 1928, William Alexander Scott began a small four-page weekly with the help of his brother Cornelius. In 1930 his __Atlanta World__ became a semiweekly, and the following year W. A. began to implement his vision for a massive newspaper chain based out of Atlanta: the Southern Newspaper Syndicate, later dubbed the Scott Newspaper Syndicate__.__ In April 1931 the __World__ had become a triweekly, and its reach began drifting beyond the South. With __The Grapevine of the Black South__, Thomas Aiello offers the first critical history of this influential newspaper syndicate, from its roots in the 1930s through its end in the 1950s. At its heyday, more than 240 papers were associated with the Syndicate, making it one of the biggest organs of the black press during the period leading up to the classic civil rights era (1955–68). In the generation that followed, the Syndicate helped formalize knowledge among the African American population in the South. As the civil rights movement exploded throughout the region, black southerners found a collective identity in that struggle built on the commonality of the news and the subsequent interpretation of that news. Or as Gunnar Myrdal explained, the press was “the chief agency of group control. It [told] the individual how he should think and feel as an American Negro and create[d] a tremendous power of suggestion by implying that all other Negroes think and feel in this manner.” It didn’t create a complete homogeneity in black southern thinking, but it gave thinkers a similar set of tools from which to draw. "The Scott Newspaper Syndicate, run by the owners of the Atlanta Daily World, included more than 240 black newspapers between 1931 and 1955. It became after World War I the modern version of the nineteenth century kinship network, the grapevine, and it looked much the same and served similar ends. In a pragmatic effort to avoid racial confrontation developing from white fear, newspaper editors developed a practical radicalism that argued on the fringes of racial hegemony and saving their loudest vitriol for tyranny that wasn't local and thus left no stake in the game for would-be white saboteurs. But the Syndicate did not remain in the South. Its membership followed the path of the Great Migration into the Midwest and West. The comparative reach of the SNS and its hundreds of newspapers was simply unparalleled. This book examines that reach, and in the process reexamines historical thinking about the Depression-era black South, the information flow of the Great Migration, the place of southern newspapers in the historiography of black journalism, and even the ideological and philosophical underpinnings of the civil rights movement"-- Provided by publisher Cover Half Title Title Copyright Dedication Contents Acknowledgments Introduction Chapter 1: Atlanta, the Scott Family, and the Creation of a Media Empire Chapter 2: Race, Representation, and the Puryear Ax Murders Chapter 3: The Unsolved Murder of William Alexander Scott Chapter 4: The SNS, Gender, and the Fight for Teacher Salary Equalization Chapter 5: Expansion beyond the South in the Wake of World War II Chapter 6: Percy Greene and the Limits of Syndication Chapter 7: Davis Lee and the Transitory Nature of Syndicate Editors Chapter 8: The Life and Death of the Scott Newspaper Syndicate Conclusion Appendix. The Papers of the Scott Newspaper Syndicate Notes Bibliography Index A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P R S T U V W Y