February 17th, 2021

Robert Sengstacke Abbott was born in St. Simons, Georgia, on November 24, 1870, just five years after the Civil War. He was a lawyer, newspaper publisher, editor, and in 1905 he founded one of the most influential Black newspapers in history - the Chicago Defender.

With an initial investment of just twenty-five cents, the Hampton Institute alum started printing the newspaper in a room out of his boarding house. What began as a four-page pamphlet distributed strictly in Black neighborhoods, quickly grew into a readership of over 200,000 by the early 1920s. As the nation’s most widely circulated Black newspaper of its time, it was known as “America’s Black Newspaper.”

Abbott and the Defender are credited with contributing significantly to the Great Migration at the turn of the 20th century. Through his writings in the newspaper, Abbott encouraged people to abandon the South by sharing stories of earlier migrants and the disparate quality of life between the North and South. Weekly, he shared photographs of the best schools, parks, and houses in Chicago juxtaposed with the worst conditions in the South. He also shared classified listings for housing and manufacturing jobs. This glimpse into a new life in the Windy City gave hope to the oppressed and disenfranchised people living in the Jim Crow South. When Southern cities banned the newspaper, Abbott used a network of Black railroad porters (later known as the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters) to distribute the newspaper in Southern states. By 1940, 1.5 million African-Americans had moved to major cities in the North and Midwest.

The Defender was not just an incredibly successful bid to persuade African-Americans to leave the South. The newspaper’s slogan, “American race prejudice must be destroyed,” let readers know that it also served as a tool to organize and fight against racial, economic, and social discrimination. Following the Great Migration, Abbott and the Defender turned their attention to other issues afflicting Black communities in the early 20th century. This included Jim Crow segregation, Woodrow Wilson’s presidency, and the deadly 1919 Chicago riots.

The Chicago Defender’s success made Abbott one of the nation’s most notable Black millionaires and paved the way for well-known Black publishers such as Earl G. Graves, John H. Johnson, and Edward Lewis. In 1940, Abbott passed away from chronic nephritis. His will left the newspaper to his nephew, John H. Sengstack. Sengstacke was a publisher, owner of the largest chain of Black newspapers in the United States, and founded the National Newspaper Publishers Association.