Robert Sengstacke Abbott

Robert Sengstacke Abbott (born November 28, 1868, Frederica, St. Simons Island, Georgia, U.S.—died February 29, 1940, Chicago, Illinois) was an American newspaper editor and publisher who founded the Chicago Defender, the most influential Black American newspaper during the early and mid-20th century. Through the Defender, Abbott helped catalyze the Great Migration, promoted civil rights, fought back against racism and racist coverage from white-owned Hearst and Pulitzer newspapers, and became one of the first African American millionaires.

Early life and education

Abbott was born on St. Simons Island in the Sea Islands of Georgia to Thomas Abbott and Flora Abbott (née Butler), two formerly enslaved people, and grew up in and later near Savannah. When Abbott was an infant, his father died of “sudden consumption,” now known as tuberculosis, in 1869. Soon afterward, Flora Abbott met John Hermann Henry Sengstacke and married him. John Sengstacke raised Abbott as his own, and Abbott adopted Sengstacke as his middle name to signal his connection to his stepfather. Abbott would soon get eight half brothers and sisters from John and Flora’s marriage, making him the eldest child in the Sengstacke family. Abbott wrote in an autobiography that “it was [my stepfather’s] teachings that gave me a lust for travel. He fed my cultural nature while my mother, endowed with practical common sense, kept my feet on the ground.”

Abbott received his early education from his stepfather’s school and church and finished high school at the Beach Institute in Savannah. He attended Claflin University in Orangeburg, South Carolina, and later studied the printing trade at Hampton Institute (now Hampton University) in Hampton, Virginia.

During his time at Hampton, Abbott sang tenor for the Hampton Quartet, which traveled across the country as one of the nation’s most renowned singing groups. The quartet traveled to Chicago to perform at the World’s Columbian Exposition on August 25, 1893, a day the event organizers designated “Colored American Day.” It was Abbott’s first visit to Chicago, and he heard Frederick Douglass give his famous speech on “the Negro problem.” In the speech, Douglass said with vigor and volume,

There is no Negro problem. The problem is whether the American people have honesty enough, loyalty enough, honor enough, patriotism enough to live up to their own Constitution.

Abbott was in the crowd, soaking in the energy of Douglass’s speech and the thunderous applause at an event boycotted by African American activists such as Ida B. Wells because of exclusionary practices in organizing and the promotion of racist depictions of African Americans at the exposition. This moment would shape Abbott’s life forever. He wrote to his family back home, “Tell father if he will back me, [that] I will stay out here in the West and try to make a fortune.”

After graduating from Hampton in 1896 he moved to Chicago, where he was shut out of the printing business as a result of racial discrimination. Abbott then decided to become a lawyer and earned a law degree from Kent College of Law (now Chicago-Kent College of Law at the Illinois Institute of Technology) in 1899.

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Failing to establish law practices in Indiana and Kansas because of the racism commonly directed toward a dark-skinned Black man operating in America, Abbott once again returned to Chicago, and in 1905 he began publication of the Chicago Defender. Under Abbott’s guidance as its publisher and editor, the newspaper vigorously defended the rights and interests of African Americans with editorials that attacked white supremacy and drew attention to anti-lynching efforts.

“The World’s Greatest Weekly”

Initially headquartered in the heart of Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood, which was home to most of the city’s Black residents and known as the “Black Metropolis” for its business and cultural significance, the Defender released its first issue on May 5, 1905, with a circulation of 300 copies. Abbott started by selling the Defender himself, and he also sold it in the Midwest through newspaper distributors. Soon he sent his weekly paper into the South, where 90 percent of Black Americans lived at the time. After this business decision, the Defender’s circulation exploded, reaching half a million African Americans weekly and outselling every other Black newspaper by 1920. Abbott declared his newspaper “The World’s Greatest Weekly,” and three factors justify this claim: authenticity, styling, and seizing the right moment in history.

What made the Defender so appealing to African Americans was Abbott’s dry wit and sarcasm. Having grown up in the Deep South and experienced racism both professionally and personally, Abbott wrote with a sharp pen and clear intent: “Ku Klux Made Possible by Bigotry and Cowardice of American White Man” and “When the Mob Comes and You Must Die Take at Least One with You” are just two headlines that show how he fought racism and lynching in America.

If a Black Southern newspaper had used headlines like these, the consequences would have been dire: a burned-out office at best, violence against its staff at worst. Yet because Abbott’s paper was headquartered in Chicago—a place where lynching wasn’t a prevalent practice—he could effectively say what other African Americans were thinking and saying in private after Reconstruction. In addition, the Defender was part of the Black press, which covered important issues, such as lynchings, that were often ignored by legacy media. This authenticity, according to historian James Grossman, helped earn the paper an incredible amount of trust and clout, solidifying Abbott’s weekly as a defender of his race.

In addition, the Defender used some of the styling of legacy media to enhance itself. One Defender journalist, J. Hockley Smiley, is credited with introducing big red headlines that differentiated the news and sports sections. Moreover, Abbott sarcastically inserted the race of white people next to their names—for example, “Woodrow Wilson (white) praised The Birth of a Nation.” This was a tongue-in-cheek critique of how papers like the Chicago Tribune would use “colored” or “negro” in parenthesis next to the name of any Black person they mentioned.

Such style choices made by Abbott and his staff—as well as the inclusion of cartoons, poems, songs, train schedules, and a section for children called Chicago Defender Jr.—elevated the Defender to greater heights, and it soon became a public resource that kept African Americans informed. Its relevance and importance would ring especially true when it came to a moment in American history known as the Great Migration.

The Defender and the Great Migration

The Defender became one of the leading promoters of the Great Migration. When America got involved in World War I, thousands of new factory jobs opened in Chicago and across the North. Realizing the economic opportunities available to African Americans who were languishing in the South, Abbott used the Defender to heavily promote the new jobs and living spaces present in Chicago, catalyzing the Great Migration for African Americans who were looking for a better life away from the terrors of lynchings and economic disenfranchisement.

Initially, white Southerners didn’t think much of the migration, believing that Black people couldn’t adjust to the cold and would then come back to the South—an example of scientific racism. They would soon find out that African Americans could weather anything if it meant a better quality of life. Indeed, more than 10,000 Black Southerners left each month in the span of four years, starting in 1916.

Realizing that they were losing workers and money, Southern leaders took action: they infringed on First Amendment rights to try to stop the movement. Local police departments confiscated issues of the Defender, arrested distributors under vagrancy laws, and even banned the sale of Black newspapers altogether.

Catching wind of this, Abbott struck a deal with Pullman porters, the train car servicemen who worked for the Pullman Company, to have them sell and distribute bundles of the Defender across the South. As they traveled, they distributed Abbott’s newspaper in secret, continuing to fuel the Great Migration. Between 1916 and 1919 roughly 500,000 African Americans left the South, and by the 1970s a total of 6,000,000 had left, changing the demographics of America forever and forging new African American communities.

Impact and legacy

By 1929 the Defender was selling more than 250,000 copies in the U.S. each week, making Abbott one of the earliest Black millionaires in American history. Using his wealth, he bought stylish clothes and cars and paid for the college educations of all of his half-siblings’ children. Abbott was married twice: first to Helen Thornton Morrison between 1918 and 1934 and then to Edna Brown Abbott from 1934. He had no children.

Besides his paper, Abbott founded the Bud Billiken Parade in 1929 with Defender editor and parade coordinator David Kellum. Held on Chicago’s South Side, the parade began as a celebration of the children who helped deliver the Defender and the members of the paper’s Bud Billiken children’s club. The parade would later transform into an annual celebration of African American culture and youth that marked the beginning of the school year for Chicago children. This parade has featured prominent figures during its 90-plus years, including the Rev. Jesse Jackson, Oprah Winfrey, Muhammad Ali, and Barack Obama.

In contrast to his flame-tipped pen, Abbott was described in a biography by Roi Ottley as a “polite, soft-voiced man, even given to kissing ladies’ hands. Seen in a different context, he would have been mistaken for a simple bookkeeper suffering from occupational myopia, or, perhaps, for an inoffensive professor from a Southern state college.” Tenacious, sarcastic, tense, and a little standoffish, Abbott enjoyed talking to people, relished the lavish lifestyle he lived as a Black millionaire, and gained recognition as someone who always stood on his principles while continuously giving back to his community.

Abbott continued to serve as editor of the Defender until his death in 1940 from Bright disease. Taking over the paper would be his nephew John H. Sengstacke, who led the paper through the civil rights movement and continued Abbott’s legacy. Abbott rests at Lincoln Cemetery in Blue Island, Illinois. His house on Chicago’s South Side is listed as a National Historic Landmark, and the Defender is still being published, more than 110 years later.