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Street Roots • Fob. 26-March 3, 2016
News
“77ze Defender: How the
Legendary Black Newspaper
Changed America” by
E than Michaeli
A u th o ^ ll^ story of
Chicago Defender,
one o f the nation’s
i n m o s t influential
African-American*
newspapers
PHO TO S CO U R TES Y O F THE C H IC A G O DEFENDER CHARITIES
Robert Abbott, founder o f The Chicago Defender, stands with
his newsboys in this undated photo from the 1920s.
John Sengstacke, his
brother Whittier, and
Louis M artin are
pictured in 1940. Soon
after beginning work
a t The Defender,
M artin was detailed to
manage The Michigan
Chronicle, a
publication based in
Detroit’s fastgrowing
African-American
community.
jj A nn-Derrick Gaillot: Robert Abbott
started The Defender out o f his landlady's
hen African-American lawyer and I fafc/zew with almost no money. How did its
printer Koberl Abbott started The I tS j ng a community funded newspaper affect
its trajectory?
Chicago Defender newspaper from
BY AflIN-OERRICK CAILLOT
■ taff WRJTER
H
ms landlady’s kfrehen table in 1905, he had
one mission in mind for his new
publication: to be a defender of race against
the violence and disenfranchisement
America reserved for African-Americans.
Over the next 110 years, The Defender
would grow from its humble beginnings
J being distributed by Pullman porters along
rail lines to become one of the most
popular and influential African-American
newspapers in the country. Its pages would
expose the horrors of Jim Crow-era
lynchings across the South and feature the
writing of such influential African-American
writers and journalists as Ida B. Wells,
Langston Hughes and Willard Motley. More
than just recording history, The Defender
made it in its editorial pages, speaking out
against segregation and racial violence,
most notably playing a pivotal role in
encouraging the Great Migration of African-
Americans to the North during World War I
and integration of the armed forces in
World War II.
Journalist and author Ethan Michaeli had
no idea of The Defender’s history when he
walked into the newspaper’s offices for a
job interview in 1991. A white Jewish kid
from New York, he was fresh out of college
and eager for the excitement of the
newspaper world. The fact that he would be
working at a black newspaper was, at the
time, just a side note. However, over the
course of his five years as a copy editor and
then investigative journalist, Michaeli would
come to learn all about The Defender’s
heritage as a black publication and its role
in American history.
Michaeli has told the entire story of the
paper in his new book, “The Defender:
How the Legendary Black Newspaper
Changed America.” Michaeli spoke with
Street Roots by phone from his home city
Chicago about The Defender’s impact and
the lessons its story holds for news writers
and readers today.
Ethan Michaeli: Robert Abbott, the
founder of The Defender, was a trained
printer, and he knew that the printing
industry was undergoing a dramatic
technological revolution. Printing, which
had been slow and expensive, suddenly
changed so that you could show up at a
printing press with some handwritten
pages and a few dollars and essentially get a
newspaper printed up which you could then
sell. He did not immediately get the rousing
support of everyone in the community, who
had never seen a mass-circulation
newspaper for African-Americans before. It
took some very difficult years of committed
work from Robert Abbott and a small
coterie of allies before the newspaper really
caught on. And then it became, really, a
national sensation, the first national
communications vehicle for African-
Americans.
A.G.: How much did the program he.had
with the Pullman porters help propel The
Defender to national popularity?
E.M.: The Pullman porters were
essential to The Defender’s success. Frank
“Fay” Young, who was a dining car
operator, was one of the first people to
begin working with Robert Abbott He was
able, because of his job, to collect
newspapers from around the country and
bring them to The Defender’s office where
he and Robert Abbot would sit together and
go through the papers looking for articles
that could be rewritten from an African-
American point of view. Fay Young started
working with other Pullman porters to get
the paper distributed all over the South.
Porters were selling subscriptions and
supplying small businesses with stocks of
newspaper on a regular basis. The fact that
small-business owners, sharecroppers and
See D EFEN D ER , p a g e 5