Chicago Defender

Chicago Defender, the most influential African American newspaper during the early and mid-20th century. Founded in Chicago in 1905 by Robert Sengstacke Abbott, the Defender played a leading role in catalyzing the Great Migration. It achieved wide circulation and influence by taking a national editorial perspective on issues of central concern to African American readers, a perspective that continues to inform the Defender today.

The Chicago Defender originally was a four-page weekly newspaper. Like the white-owned Hearst and Pulitzer newspapers, the Defender under Abbott used sensationalism to boost circulation. Editorials attacking white supremacy and the lynching of African Americans helped increase the paper’s circulation in Southern states.

During World War I the Defender urged equal treatment of Black soldiers. It published dispatches contrasting opportunities for African Americans in the urban North with the privations of the rural South, contributing actively to the decisions of millions of Black Southerners to move to the North and West between World War I and the Great Depression. By 1929 the Defender was selling more than 250,000 copies each week. Abbott also established in 1929 the Bud Billiken Parade, which was (and remains) closely connected to the Defender.

Along with other African American newspapers, the Defender protested the treatment of Black servicemen fighting in World War II and urged the integration of the U.S. armed forces. As a result of their protests, the U.S. government threatened to indict African American publishers for sedition, but the Defender’s publisher, John H. Sengstacke, negotiated a compromise with the Justice Department that protected the First Amendment rights of the African American press.

The Defender became a daily newspaper in 1956. It has been 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 the Defender column he wrote for more than 20 years. After Sengstacke’s death in 1997, the Defender’s national influence diminished, with circulation declining to less than 20,000.

In 2003 the newspaper was bought by Real Times, a company controlled by one of Sengstacke’s relatives. Five years later the Chicago Defender again became a weekly publication. In 2019 it ended its print edition and focused solely on its online content.