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Chicago Defender
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The Chicago Defender was the United States’ largest and most influential black weekly newspaper by the beginning of World War I. The Defender was founded on May 5, 1905 by Robert S. Abbott with an investment of 25 cents and a press run of 300 copies. The first issues, which were created on the kitchen table of his landlord’s apartment, were four-page, six-column handbills and filled with news gathered by Abbott, as well as clippings from other, more established newspapers.
By 1910, Abbott was in a position to hire a full time employee and the Defender began to attain a national reputation.
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Encyclopedia
The Chicago Defender was the United States’ largest and most influential black weekly newspaper by the beginning of World War I. The Defender was founded on May 5, 1905 by Robert S. Abbott with an investment of 25 cents and a press run of 300 copies. The first issues, which were created on the kitchen table of his landlord’s apartment, were four-page, six-column handbills and filled with news gathered by Abbott, as well as clippings from other, more established newspapers.
By 1910, Abbott was in a position to hire a full time employee and the Defender began to attain a national reputation. Using the yellow journalism techniques from other papers, the Defender began to attack racial injustice. The paper’s circulation was helped by Pullman porters and entertainers who distributed the newspaper south of the Mason-Dixon line. By 1917, more than two-thirds of the paper’s readership was outside Chicago. It was the first black paper with a circulation over 250,000 and it is believed that as many as half a million people read the newspaper each week.
In the late teens, the Defender campaigned for blacks to migrate from the South to the North and was highly successful, tripling the black population in Chicago and other major cities in the North and Northwest. In just three years from 1916–1918. The Defender also attracted the writing talents of Langston Hughes and
Gwendolyn Brooks.
In 1923, Abbott and editor Lucius Harper created the Bud Billiken Club and later organized parades to promote healthy activity among black children in Chicago. In 1929 the organization began the Bud Billiken Parade and Picnic, which is still held annually in Chicago in early August. In the 1950s under Sengstacke's direction, the Bud Billiken Parade expanded and emerged as the largest single event in Chicago. Today, it attracts more than one million attendance with more than 25 million television viewers making it one of the largest parades in the country.
Abbott's nephew, John H. Sengstacke, took over the paper in 1948. In the same year, he encouraged President Harry S. Truman to integrate the Armed Service, which he did soon after. Sengstacke served as a member of Truman's appointed committee to assure the military had implemented a plan to fully integrate the military.
Sengstacke also played a key role in the initial election of Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley by influencing Chicago's Republican Congressional member William L. Dawson to become a Democrat. He did and Daley received nearly 90 percent of the Black vote assuring his election. Black voters in Chicago have been voting Democratic ever since. Abbott's nephew also brought together for the first time major Black newspaper publishers and created the National Negro Publisher's Association, later renamed the National Newspaper Publishers Association (NNPA). Today the NNPA consists of over 200 black newspaper members. Two days following the publishers' first meeting in Chicago, Abbott died.
Sengstacke is also credited with integrating many of Chicago's major city government departments including the Chicago Police Department, the Chicago Fire Department and the Board of Education. He is also responsible for the appointment of James B. Parsons to the federal bench, the first Black Federal Judge appointed since reconstruction. For more than two decades until his death, Sengstacke was named one of the nation's most influential Black leaders by Black Enterprise Magazine.
One of his most striking accomplishments occurred on February 6, 1956, when the Defender became a daily paper and changed its name to the Chicago Daily Defender, the nation's first black daily newspaper. Sengstacke also created Sengstacke Enterprises, Inc. and was its principal shareholder together with his siblings: Fred, Florence, Ethel, Whittier and his son Robert. When Sengstacke died in 1997, his trust dictated that the Northern Trust Company become the Trustee of his estate.
In 1998, the beneficiaries of the Trust terminated the services of The Northern Trust Company and the Circuit Court of Cook County, Illinois appointed James H. Lowry, as interim Trustee. Throughout Lowry's tenure as Chairman and CEO of Sengstacke Enterprises, Inc. and Trustee of the Sengstacke Trust each of the Sengstacke company publications (Michigan Chronicle, Tri-State Defender, The New Pittsburgh Courier, and the Chicago Defender) incurred significant operational debts which likely impaired the value of Sengstacke Enterprises, Inc. Several bids for the papers were considered, but only one, led by Sengstacke's nephew, Thomas Sengstacke Picou, and Sengstacke's son, Robert Abbott Sengstacke, was successful.
Control of the Chicago Defender and her sister publications was transferred to a new ownership group named Real Times Inc. in January 2003. Real Times, Inc. was organized and led by Picou, and Robert (Bobby), John H. Sengstacke's surviving child and father of the beneficiaries of the Sengstacke Trust. In effect, Picou, then Chairman and CEO of Real Times, Inc., led what was then labeled a "Sengstacke family led" deal to facilitate Trust beneficiaries and other Sengstacke family shareholders to agree to the sale of the company. Picou recruited Sam Logan, former publisher of the Michigan Chronicle, who then recruited O'Neil Swanson, Bill Pickard, Ron Hall and Gordon Follmer, black businessman from Detroit, Michigan (the "Detroit Group") as investors in Real Times. Chicago investors included Picou, Bobby Sengstacke, David M. Milliner (who served as publisher of the Chicago Defender from 2003-2004), Kurt Cherry and James Carr.
See also
External links
- Karen E. Pride, Chicago Defender, May 5, 2005
- Coverage of star-studded opening for exhibition of Defender photography
Samples of a few of the comic strips created for the Defender
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