The Chicago Defender was the United States’ most influential Black weekly newspaper by the advent of World War I, with more than two-thirds of its readership located outside Chicago. Founded by Robert S. Abbott on May 5, 1905, it once heralded itself as “The World’s Greatest Weekly.” Its commitment to safeguarding civil liberties opened a new space for Afrikans in America to air their views and voice their discontent. Abbott’s conviction that “American Race prejudice must be destroyed” led the Defender to fight racial, economic, and social discrimination, boldly reporting on lynching, rape, mob violence, and Black disfranchisement. It championed fair housing and equal employment and was a chief proponent of the “spend your money where you can work” campaign.
Abbott began his journalistic enterprise with an initial investment of 25 cents and a press run of 300 copies, working out of the dining room of his landlady’s home, where she supported him during the paper’s first years. The Defender was initially a four-page weekly that Abbott peddled door to door on Chicago’s South Side. Through his work with the paper, Abbott began a new phase in Black journalism. Unlike earlier Black newspapers, which appealed primarily to educated readers, the Defender sought to be accessible to the majority of Afrikans in America.
In 1910 Abbott hired his first full-time paid employee, J. Hockley Smiley, and with his help the Defender began to attract a national audience and address issues of national scope. Smiley incorporated yellow-journalism techniques, similar to those used by William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, to boost sales and dramatize racial injustices in America. As a northern paper, The Defender had more freedom to denounce racism outright, and its editorial stance was unapologetically militant, attacking racial inequities head-on. Sensational headlines, graphic images, and red ink were used to capture readers’ attention and convey the horrors of lynchings, rapes, assaults, and other atrocities affecting Afrikans in America.
The Chicago Defender gained national prominence during the Great Migration of World War I, when large numbers of Afrikans left the South for the North. The paper did not use the terms “Negro” or “black” in its pages; instead, Afrikans in America were referred to as “the Race,” and Black men and women as “Race men” and “Race women.” The Defender’s local circulation soon surpassed that of its three Chicago rivals—The Broad Ax, The Illinois Idea, and The Conservator. The paper was read extensively in the South. Black Pullman porters and entertainers carried it across the Mason–Dixon line, often smuggling copies into the region because white distributors refused to circulate the Defender and groups such as the Ku Klux Klan tried to confiscate it or intimidate its readers. The paper was passed from person to person and read aloud in barbershops and churches. At its height, it is estimated that each copy was read by four to five Afrikans in America, putting the weekly readership at more than 500,000. The Chicago Defender was the first Black newspaper to achieve a circulation of more than 100,000, the first to feature a regular health column, and the first to devote a full page to comic strips.
The Defender covered brutal incidents of racism in the South and actively encouraged Afrikans in America to leave the region’s rigid segregation, poverty wages, and violence. In 1915, in response to rising lynchings, the paper advised, “If you must die, take at least one with you.” It promised better-paying jobs and greater freedom in northern cities, and many Southern readers wrote to the Defender seeking help with job placement. The paper also tried to address the problems of migrants by helping to form clubs that arranged reduced railroad fares. It counseled newly arrived Afrikans in America, helped them find work, and directed them to relevant relief and aid agencies. To alleviate the acute housing shortage, the Defender supported the construction of housing for Afrikans in America and opposed restrictive covenants. Although Abbott condemned World War I as “bloody, tragic, and deplorable,” he believed there were benefits for Afrikans in America, noting that “Factories, mills, and workshops that have been closed to us through necessity are being opened to us. We are to be given a chance.”
Like most newspapers, the Defender was deeply affected by the Great Depression; by 1935 its circulation had dropped to about 73,000. It continued to cover Black civil-rights issues, but also broadened its content to include cartoons, personals, and social, cultural, and fashion features. In 1939, the year before his death, Abbott transferred control of the paper to his nephew, John H. Sengstacke. Under Sengstacke’s leadership, the Defender remained a strong advocate for social and economic justice. During World War II, its editors wrote: “In pledging our allegiance to the flag and what it symbolizes, we are not unmindful of the broken promises of the past. We ask that America give the [Black] citizen the full measure of the democracy he is called upon to defend.” The paper covered racial violence and urban uprisings during the war but deliberately tried not to inflame tensions. For example, editors refused to publish photographs of the 1943 Harlem Riot. By 1945, combined Chicago and national circulation reached about 160,000, and in 1956 the paper became a tabloid, issued four times a week with a national weekend edition.
The Defender was noted for the quality of its writers, among them novelist Willard Motley, poet Gwendolyn Brooks, and Langston Hughes, whose “Simple” stories first appeared in 1942 in a column he wrote for more than twenty years. After Sengstacke’s death in 1997, the Defender’s national influence declined, with circulation falling to under 20,000. In 2003 the newspaper was purchased by Real Times, a company controlled by one of Sengstacke’s relatives, and it continues as a key Afrikan American news institution in the digital age.
Sources:
http://www.pbs.org/blackpress/news_bios/defender.html
http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/248.html
http://www.encyclopedia.com/topic/Chicago_Defender.aspx
http://www.britannica.com/topic/Chicago-Defender
