DEFENDER TO STOP THE PRESSES (BUT KEEP PUBLISHING)
Storied African American newspaper that played key role in civil rights movement to cease print operations, move to digital-only platform
The Chicago Defender will cease print operations next week, ending a storied 114-year newspaper legacy that included driving the Great Migration of African Americans to Chicago from the South and bolstering the black electorate as a key constituency in national politics.
Wednesday marks the final physical edition from the Defender’s Bronzeville newsroom, its executives announced Friday, with the outlet switching to a digital-only platform on Thursday.
“Under the print version, we could not reach people where they live and work,” said Hiram E. Jackson, CEO of Real Times Media, the Detroit-based black newspaper chain that bought the Defender in 2003. “Being a digital-only outlet will help us reach people on the West Side or South Side or south suburbs, giving people what they need when they want it. It makes us more nimble.
“We’re really excited to pave the way to the future in really making sure there is a spot in the future for the black press. We have more newspapers than any other black media company in the country. I see this as our responsibility to show what the future looks like,” Jackson said.
Looking to the past, the Defender’s place in history is unparalleled.
“It was an essential force in American history for the whole of the 20th century,” said University of Chicago lecturer Ethan Michaeli, a former Defender staffer and author of the 2016 book “The Defender: How the Legendary Black Newspaper Changed America.”
Drawn to Chicago from Georgia for the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893 — where he met Frederick Douglass and Ida B. Wells — Robert Sengstacke Abbott founded the Chicago Defender in 1905.
His four-page weekly edition, crafted on his landlady’s dining table, focused on Chicago neighborhood news, highlighted white oppression and the lynchings of African Americans across the South. And he eventually used his editorial page to encourage black Americans to make the journey north. Abbott partnered with Pullman railway porters to turn the paper into “a national communications vehicle for African Americans,” Michaeli said.
“He was the first motivator of the Great Migration. He wasn’t encouraging until he saw it could be a weapon against Jim Crow laws, by depriving the South of a labor force and improving the relative political position of African Americans,” Michaeli said.
It was during its heyday in 1929 that the paper created one of its lasting legacies: the Bud Billiken Parade. Abbott, the paper’s founder, and his managing editor already had a “youth page,” and decided to create a club named for the mythical “Bud Billiken” — associated with an ancient Chinese character believed to be the guardian angel of all children, according to the Encyclopedia of Chicago. It became so popular that Abbott decided a parade was in order.
Circulation topped 250,000 that year, though its reach was thought to be closer to 1 million thanks to porters passing copies along the north-south line of the Illinois Central Railroad.
Abbott’s nephew John H.H. Sengstacke took over the paper after Abbott’s death in 1940. Sengstacke rallied for the equal treatment of African Americans in the military, eventually negotiating with President Harry Truman for full integration. Politicians grew to recognize the Defender’s editorial page as a key barometer of an important voting bloc, Michaeli said.
Mamie Till-Mobley, the mother of Emmett Till, highlighted the national reach of the paper in the civil rights movement when explaining
her choice to hold an open-casket funeral after her son’s infamous 1955 lynching during a visit to Mississippi.
“I knew that if they walked by that casket, if people opened the pages of Jet magazine and the Chicago Defender, if other people could see it with their own eyes, then together we might find a way to express what we had seen,” she wrote in a book she co-authored in 2003. “It was important to do that, I thought, to help people recognize the horrible problems we were facing in the South.”
When it became a daily newspaper in 1956, the Defender counted literary heavyweights Gwendolyn Brooks and Langston Hughes among its ranks.
In addition to its national prominence, the paper held close to its neighborhood coverage. Theresa Fambro Hooks kept tabs with her beloved “Teesee’s Town” society column, and longtime arts and culture columnist Earl Calloway went to bat for countless local entertainers overlooked by more mainstream outlets.
“When someone asks about a black newspaper in Chicago, people automatically say ‘Chicago Defender,’ ’’ said Dorothy Leavell, publisher of the Chicago Crusader. “That’s because of its longevity and service to the community.”
Glenn Reedus, the Defender’s managing editor from 2007-09, said one of his proudest moments came in 1971 when the paper chose to run his story about the former ABLA Homes public housing development on the Near West Side. Reedus recalled the common joke that could be heard in many black neighborhoods: “It didn’t happen if it wasn’t in the Chicago Defender.”
Circulation dwindled to 30,000 by the mid-1990s as the newspaper industry was decimated by advertising losses.
Jackson said the paper’s circulation was down to about 16,000 subscribers this year. He declined to say how many full-time staffers remain — it had 18 employees at the time of its last major staff cuts in October 2011 — but said the digital switch would not result in any layoffs.
“We’ll take the dollars we spend on printing and distribution, and invest them in people in the community delivering neighborhood reporting,” Jackson said. In a letter to advertisers, he and Defender Vice President Dyanna Lewis called the switch a “win-win” for readers, advertisers and employees.
“We have to continually evolve our focus to reflect the habits of our readers and our audience,” they wrote. “We remain focused on those vehicles that genuinely serve our client base.”