Robert S. Abott

Robert S. Abbott founded the Chicago Defender as a two-cent weekly published from his landlady's kitchen and expanded it into the nation's foremost African-American publication. Born on Nov. 24, 1868 on St. Simon's Island, Ga., Abbott learned about the newspaper trade from his stepfather, who published a local paper. He attended Hampton Institute in Virginia and then enrolled in Chicago's Kent College of Law, from which he graduated in 1899. Finding it difficult to practice law due to racial discrimination, Abbott chose instead to publish a newspaper. The Chicago Defender was first published on May 5, 1905. For five years, Abbott was the Defender's sole editor, ad salesman and circulation director. He hired his first employee in 1910. By 1920, the paper's circulation exceeded 200,000 and was widely read in the North and in the South. During the 1920s and 1930s, Abbott sent reporters to cover lynchings and Jim Crow laws designed to segregate African Americans. As a result, the Defender became viewed as a radical newspaper and was banned in some parts of the South. Despite that, Abbott sent his papers south via railroad porters and waged one of his most aggressive campaigns to convince Southern Blacks to move north during World War I. His paper ran articles, editorials, cartoons even train schedules and job listings to convince the Defender's Southern readers to come north. The Great Northern Migration, as it was called in the Defender, resulted in more than one million Blacks migrating north, about 100,000 of them coming to Chicago. As the paper grew, regular contributors to the Defender included famed intellectual W.E.B. Dubois, writer Langston Hughes and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Gwendolyn Brooks. The success of the paper made Abbott one of the first Black self-made millionaires in the country. He died on Feb. 29, 1940. Editorship of the paper was assumed by his nephew, John H. H. Sengstacke, who was handpicked by Abbott for the job.