Chicago Defender

The Chicago Defender

The Chicago Defender announces President Harry S. Truman's order in 1948 desegregating the United States Armed Forces.
Type	Weekly newspaper
Format	Tabloid
Owner(s)	Real Times Inc.
Founded	May 5, 1905
Headquarters	Chicago
Circulation	16,000 weekly
ISSN	0745-7014
Website	www.chicagodefender.com

The Chicago Defender is a Chicago-based weekly newspaper founded in 1905 by Robert S. Abbott for primarily African-American readers. Historically, The Defender is considered the "most important" paper of what was then known as the colored or negro press. Abbott's newspaper reported and campaigned against Jim Crow era violence and urged blacks in the American South to come north in what became the Great Migration. Under his nephew and chosen successor, John H. Sengstacke, the paper took on segregation, especially in the U.S. military, during World War II.

In 1919–1922 the Defender attracted the writing talents of Langston Hughes. Later, Gwendolyn Brooks and Willard Motley wrote for the paper. It was published as The Chicago Daily Defender, a daily newspaper, from 1956 to 2003, when it returned to a weekly format.

The editor and founder Robert Sengstacke Abbott played a major role in influencing the Great Migration of African Americans from the rural South to the urban North by means of strong, moralistic rhetoric in his editorials and political cartoons, the promotion of Chicago as a destination, and the advertisement of successful black individuals as inspiration for blacks in the South. The rhetoric and art exhibited in the Defender demanded equality of the races and promoted a northern migration. Abbott published articles that were exposés of southern crimes against blacks. The Defender consistently published articles describing lynchings in the South, with vivid descriptions of gore and the victims' deaths. Lynchings were at a peak at the turn of the century, in the period when southern state legislatures passed new constitutions and laws to disenfranchise most blacks and exclude them from the political system. Legislatures dominated by conservative white Democrats established racial segregation and Jim Crow.