The Defender: How the Black Press Connected Communities and Gained Influence over National Politics

Founded as a weekly in 1905 by Robert S. Abbott, The Chicago Defender became Black America’s first national communications vehicle using newly available mass printing machines as well as page design techniques pioneered by Hearst and Pulitzer. Abbott, a graduate of the Hampton Institute (now Hampton University) and law school in Chicago, was inspired to launch the newspaper by his meetings at the 1893 World’s Fair with Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells and other intellectuals, relationships he maintained as he built his newspaper into a major political force. His news pages exposed the horrors of Jim Crow, while editorials inspired millions to come to Northern cities in what became known as the Great Migration. The Defender’s circulation reached nearly 300,000 newspapers sold each week in the early 1920s, but it reached nearly every African American household throughout the country, reconnecting those who had moved and focusing the political efforts of individual communities and the whole electorate. Alongside rivals as well as colleagues like the Pittsburgh Courier, the Black Press collectively wielded substantial political clout, providing the swing votes that elected Harry S. Truman and John F. Kennedy to the Presidency, and despite their decline as the century wore on, this paper demonstrates the level of the credit that black newspapers like the Chicago Defender certainly deserve in particular for their decades of political advocacy.