CHICAGO DEFENDER

the most influential black newspaper in the United States during the early and mid-20th century. The Defender, published in Chicago with a national editorial perspective, played a leading role in the widespread migration of American blacks from the South to the North. Founded in 1905 by Robert S. Abbott, the Chicago Defender originally was a four-page weekly newspaper. Like the white-owned Hearst and Pulitzer newspapers, the Defender under Abbott used sensationalism to boost circulation. Editorials attacking white oppression and lynching of blacks helped increase its circulation in southern states. It urged equal treatment of black soldiers during World War I. It published dispatches contrasting opportunities for blacks in the urban North with the privations of the rural South, contributing actively to the northward migration of some 1,250,000 blacks between World War I and the Great Depression. By 1929 the Defender was selling more than 250,000 copies each week. During World War II the Defender, like other black newspapers, protested the treatment of black servicemen and urged the integration of the armed forces. As a result the U.S. government threatened to indict black publishers for sedition; however, the Defender's publisher, John H. Sengstacke, negotiated a compromise with the Justice Department that allowed black journalists access to federal officials. The Defender became a daily newspaper in 1956. It was noted for the quality of its writers, among them novelist Willard Motley, poet Gwendolyn Brooks, and author Langston Hughes, whose "Simple" stories first appeared in the Defender column he wrote for more than 20 years, beginning in 1942. By 1995 the Defender's national influence had been substantially diminished, and its circulation had declined to less than 30,000.