Abstract
Ethan Michaeli has written a big, sprawling narrative of one of the nation’s most influential African American newspapers, the Chicago Defender. The Defender was founded in 1905 by Robert Abbott during what has been termed the nadir for African Americans. At a time when anti-Black violence and antipathy was at its height, and segregation and discrimination were both legal and socially sanctioned, Abbott set out to create a forum for Black interests and an engine for Black entrepreneurship. During the newspaper’s more than 100 years—it is still published today—the Defender played a role in most of the critical episodes of African American history, including the Great Migration, the two world wars, and the long civil rights movement. Abbott, who was at the helm of the Defender until the late 1930s, has often been credited with fueling the migration of rural Southern Blacks to Chicago and other destinations. Under his direction, the newspaper exhorted African Americans to escape their suffering under Jim Crow and to envision African American communities in the North as places of opportunity and progress. The Defender provided its readers with weekly advice, news, and practical resources, while also documenting individual and institutional manifestations of racism. The newspaper became known for its unabashed denunciation of White supremacy and its biting humor that underscored a spirit of protest. In 1919, poet Carl Sandberg, then a columnist for the Chicago Daily News, spent a week at the newspaper and declared that the Defender was in the forefront of the struggle for racial justice. Abbott’s nephew John Sengstacke took over as publisher in 1940s and steered the Defender through lean financial times and the rise of the civil rights and Black power movements in the second half of the 20th century. Since its founding, the Defender has been home to a vast and rich array of talented and energetic writers, editors, photographers, and artists all dedicated to building and sustaining a Black public sphere. This text offers glimpses of the Defender’s political impact as well, from helping to elect Chicago’s first Black Alderman, to contributing to the rise of Mayor Harold Washington and Illinois Senator Barack Obama, who was later elected the 44th president of the United States. Michaeli reports that by the 1970s, the Chicago Defender was one of the 25 richest African American businesses in the country. But in the 21st century, the Defender’s story, like much of the print media, has been one of decline and struggle in the digital age.
Michaeli, who worked at the Defender in the 1990s, has produced an encyclopedic accounting of the individuals involved in the newspaper’s operations, its political and business dealings, and the stories it covered. This is Black history through the lens of the press, including not only the Defender but also its counterparts such as the Pittsburgh Courier and the Cleveland Call and Post. This book, written in a lively and accessible manner, is not a scholarly study, however. Michaeli provides fairly brief—and sometimes sketchy—overviews of historical context, whether the topic is Roosevelt’s New Deal or the Red Summer of 1919. A review of the bibliography reveals that important scholarship on the Black press and crucial sources on African American history were not consulted. If the newspaper itself is the “first draft of history,” Michaeli’s book is the second. His primary sources are mostly articles in the Defender and other publications, as well as material from a recently released archive of the Abbott-Sengstacke family papers, an early biography of Abbott, and sources from other journalists. Thus, the reader is left to wonder how much Michaeli has verified or dug into the Defender’s accounts of people, events, and issues, or simply reproduced them.
The 1955 murder of Chicago teenager Emmett Till illustrates how this book fails to illuminate historical knowledge. Till was lynched in Mississippi by two avowed racists, and the widespread publicity about this atrocity was a catalyst for Black outrage and civil rights activism. As Michaeli recounts, the Defender
There are several other problems with this book—Women as members of the Black press or as subjects of the news are largely invisible, with the exception of Ida Wells-Barnett and Ethyl Payne. Because the author follows the Defender’s stories chronologically, each chapter jumps back and forth between numerous threads rather than following one with greater depth and detail. And the final chapters revert to the first person as Michaeli inserts himself into the newspaper’s history. Yet this is a worthwhile and readable book. It offers readers a vision of Black life in these United States through the pages of a brave and admirable journalistic institution.