Abbott, Robert Sengstacke

Impact on the world

Starting with a press run of 300 copies produced in his landlady's kitchen, Abbott built the Chicago Defender into a paper with a circulation exceeding 250,000 by 1929 — read, by some estimates, by four to five people per copy — using a distribution network of Pullman porters to smuggle bundles into the segregated South, where the paper was banned in many towns. Abbott used sensational red headlines, blistering anti-lynching editorials, and relentless coverage contrasting Southern brutality with Northern opportunity to actively organize the Great Migration, setting May 15, 1917, as the date for a “Great Northern Drive” and running job listings and train schedules alongside his reporting; the resulting migration reshaped the demographics of American cities for the rest of the century. The Defender's success made Abbott one of the first African American self-made millionaires, and he later founded the Bud Billiken Parade in 1929, still one of the largest African American parades in the country.

Life & background

Born November 28 (some sources state December 24), 1870, on St. Simons Island, Georgia, to formerly enslaved parents of Gullah heritage, Abbott studied printing at Hampton Institute, graduating in 1896, and earned a law degree from Kent College of Law in Chicago, but found no clients willing to hire a Black attorney. He turned to journalism, founding the Defender in May 1905, and expanded it into a multimedia operation including the short-lived Abbott's Monthly, which published early work by Richard Wright and Chester Himes; Illinois Governor Frank Lowden appointed him to the Chicago Commission on Race Relations in 1919 following that summer's race riots. He groomed his nephew, John H. Sengstacke, as his successor, joined the Bahá'í Faith in 1934 after finding it uniquely free of the colorism he observed even within some Black religious communities, and died in Chicago on February 29, 1940.

Sources

1. Encyclopædia Britannica; BlackPast.org; New Georgia Encyclopedia