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Salem Press

Great Lives from History: African Americans

Robert S. Abbott

by Wayne Dawkins

Journalist, business executive, and activist

Abbott established The Chicago Defender, a nationally distributed newspaper covering and catering to African Americans, during the first half of the twentieth century. Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal called Abbott the founder of the modern black press. His newspaper helped lead the Great Migration of African Americans out of the rural South to Chicago and other northern industrial cities.

Areas of achievement: Business; Journalism and publishing; Social issues

Early Life

Robert Sengstacke Abbott was born in the town of Frederica on St. Simons Island in Georgia, a barrier island where black residents retained African-oriented Gullah traditions. Abbott’s father died when he was an infant. His dark-skinned hairdresser mother, Flora Abbott, married John Sengstacke, a German mulatto. Sengstacke started a four-page newspaper and Abbott, still a boy, assisted in its production and distribution.

Robert S. Abbott, right.

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Abbott left coastal Georgia for Hampton Institute in Virginia to study printing. He also sang in a touring group that solicited donations for the college. He earned his degree in 1896, then returned to Georgia and worked at his stepfather’s newspapers, The Woodville Times and The Echo, as a trained printer.

Abbott demonstrated a desire to be successful despite racial slights. Abbott was rejected by the family of his light-complexioned girlfriend because of his dark skin and West African features. Spurned, Abbott left Georgia again for Chicago, where he studied law at Kent College. He earned a degree but was not admitted to the bar. Abbott was told a number of times that law firms would not hire him because of his complexion; he posed too big a risk of causing courtroom defeats for partners or clients, he was told.

Abbott was desperate to find meaningful work on his terms. In 1904, a political friend found him work inside a Chicago printing house. A year later, the trained printer created his own enterprise.

Life’s Work

In 1905, about forty thousand African Americans lived in Chicago. Three black-oriented newspapers circulated in that community. Abbott surveyed the competition and was sure that he could produce a better product. He quit a printing job and rented a room on State Street. With a borrowed card table and chair and $0.25 he needed for paper and pencils, Abbott sat down and composed The Chicago Defender, a four-page circular. The newspaper’s name was inspired by Abbott’s commitment to defend African Americans. Jim Crow segregation—formally legalized by the 1896 U.S. Supreme Court decision in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson—was nearly a decade old.

Abbott began publishing on May 5, 1905. He obtained credit from a printer in order to make three hundred copies of the paper for a total cost of $13.75. Abbott then personally sold his two-cent weekly door to door. Later that same year, he began to attract paid advertisements that provided revenue necessary in order to continue publishing. During the lean early months, Abbott’s landlord let the struggling publisher use her dining room as a work space. She also provided meals and let him use her telephone. Years later, when Abbott’s newspaper prospered, he bought her an eight-bedroom house.

Abbott’s newspaper catered to the interests of the working poor and black Chicagoans. Lynching and other violence against African Americans was a frequent topic in The Chicago Defender. In 1906, when African American soldiers in Brownsville, Texas, were mistreated and they retaliated against the locals, Abbott played up the story prominently. In 1910, Abbott hired his first paid employee, J. Hockley Smiley, an editor with a passion for sensational, muckraking stories.

The Chicago Defender’s circulation was aided by the fifty thousand people who migrated to Chicago from the rural South before World War I. Abbott’s legacy was that of an activist who strongly urged southern African Americans to drop their plows and cotton field sacks and come north to Chicago for employment in industrial jobs and for freedom from Jim Crow segregation. During and immediately after World War I, The Chicago Defender campaigned for better treatment of black soldiers, who often were harassed and menaced by whites.

African Americans in the Deep South followed The Chicago Defender’s clarion calls to leave in droves. White authorities in many southern towns banned circulation of The Chicago Defender and threatened residents with arrest for discussing the newspaper. Abbott employed black Pullman sleeping car porters who clandestinely distributed the newspapers at railroad stops.

National circulation of The Chicago Defender peaked at 250,000 in 1925. The publisher at that time had the revenue to purchase a $500,000 printing plant that he racially integrated. Abbott employed a white foreman and white salesmen in addition to numerous African Americans. When the Great Depression reduced circulation to 73,000 in 1935, Abbott subsidized his newspaper with $250,000 and kept it publishing.

Abbott called The Chicago Defender“The World’s Greatest Weekly,” a play on the daily Chicago Tribune’s slogan, “The World’s Greatest Newspaper.” Abbott’s Defender played contrarian to another leading black publication, The Crisis, edited by W. E. B. Du Bois, who famously said a “talented tenth” of black elites should lead the masses. Abbott countered that the masses, not the upper classes, should lead.

Newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst obtained an injunction against Abbott, claiming that the owl design in The Chicago Defender’s nameplate infringed on The Chicago American’s eagle logo. Between editions, Abbott replaced the owl with a sphinx and continued publishing.

Significance

In addition to informing, entertaining, and rallying readers to action, The Chicago Defender helped relocating southern African Americans become acclimated to urban life. The newspaper printed letters from migrants searching for jobs and places to live and schooled bewildered newcomers on appropriate conduct in the big city. One account, repeated on the 1999 PBS documentary Soldiers Without Swords: The Black Press, contained these lines:

Men, don’t parade on the avenue in your hog killing clothes

and women, before you flirt with the butcher,

remember to pick the lint out of your hair.

Tens of thousands of African Americans heeded The Chicago Defender’s counsel, and southerners continued to pour into Chicago. After World War I, an additional 100,000 people arrived in the city and settled primarily on the South Side, which was dubbed the “Black Metropolis” by authors St. Claire Drake and Horace R. Cayton.

Abbott played a decisive role in reshaping a city demographically, not unlike several generations of the Chandler family, who invented modern Los Angeles by using their Los Angeles Times to recruit Midwesterners and convert a former goat-herding village into an affluent metropolis. Furthermore, The Chicago Defender was one of a trio of outstanding nationally circulated black newspapers that prospered during the early to mid-twentieth century. The Chicago Defender’s peers were the Pittsburgh Courier and the Afro-American of Baltimore.

Abbott groomed his nephew John H. Sengstacke, son of Abbott’s brother Alexander, to take over The Chicago Defender. In 1939, Abbott willed two thirds of his estate to his nephew; the remaining third went to his second wife. Abbott died on February 29, 1940, during the week his nephew convened a summit of twenty black newspaper owners.

Further Reading

1 

Ottley, Roi. The Lonely Warrior: The Life and Times of Robert S. Abbott. Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1955. Full-length biography of Abbott that details his illustrious career and The Chicago Defender’s influence on African American culture.

2 

Pride, Armistead S., and Clint C. Wilson II. A History of the Black Press. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1997. Comprehensive report that explores Abbott’s significance to journalism and African American history.

3 

Senna, Carl. The Black Press and the Struggle for Civil Rights. New York: Franklin Watts, 1994. Explores the role of African American newspapers in advocating for civil rights, including Abbott’s urging of readers to leave the Jim Crow South.

4 

Wilkerson, Isabel. The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration. New York: Random House, 2010. This comprehensive account of the Great Migration describes Abbott’s and The Chicago Defender’s role in the movement.

5 

Wolseley, Roland. The Black Press USA. Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1990. Provides an overview of the African American newspaper industry throughout its history.

Citation Types

Type
Format
MLA 9th
Dawkins, Wayne. "Robert S. Abbott." Great Lives from History: African Americans, edited by Carl L. Bankston, Salem Press, 2011. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=GLAA_100355596830.
APA 7th
Dawkins, W. (2011). Robert S. Abbott. In C. L. Bankston (Ed.), Great Lives from History: African Americans. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.
CMOS 17th
Dawkins, Wayne. "Robert S. Abbott." Edited by Carl L. Bankston. Great Lives from History: African Americans. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2011. Accessed October 22, 2025. online.salempress.com.