Robert Sengstacke Abbott (1870 – 1940) was born of freeman parents and was given his middle name by his stepfather at the age of one. Abbott studied at Claflin University, Hampton Institute, and Kent Law School. He received his law degree in 1899, but could not find work due to discrimination and felt that he could defend his people better as a newspaper publisher and editor. He worked at his stepfather’s newspaper, the Woodville Times, to learn the trade as a printer.
He founded the Chicago Defender with a 25-cent investment in 1905. The paper became known as America’s first daily black newspaper and was the most widely circulated black newspaper in the country. Circulation reached 50,000 by 1916, 125,000 by 1918, and more than 200,000 by the early 1920s. A crucial part of Abbott’s marketing network was black railroad porters. The porters sold and distributed the Chicago Defender on the trains and helped its rapid growth through the 1920s. The Chicago Defender made Abbott one if the first self-made millionaires.
Abbott set a provocative tone in his newspaper and gave a voice to blacks to fight racism, segregation, discrimination, and disenfranchisement. He wrote, “America’s race prejudice must be destroyed.” The Chicago Defender would report on violence against blacks, struggles against black workers and lynchings. In 1915, the paper’s anti-lynching slogan was, “If you must die, take at least one with you.” He would also campaign against Jim Crow laws and encouraged blacks to move from the South to Chicago as well as other cities and in the North and the Midwest. He was credited with the great migration of 1.5 million rural blacks from 1917 to 1940, 100,000 of them in Chicago alone.