#BlackHistoryMonth – Robert Abbott’s paper told Black stories

From errand boy to lawyer to publisher, as founder of one of the most read Black newspapers in the United States, Robert Sengstacke Abbott gave voice to a Black point of view that had been rendered mute in the early twentieth century.

Born in Georgia on November 24, 1868, to Thomas and Flora Butler Abbott a couple whose parents had been slaves, Abbott was still a baby when his father died of leukemia.

His mother, Flora, later married John Sengstacke, a mulatto of German descent who promptly added Sengstacke to Robert’s name.

Abbott graduated from Hampton Institute in Virginia. After college he moved to Chicago, a city to which he had been exposed while singing with the Hampton College Quartet at the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893. He graduated from Chicago’s Kent College of Law in 1898, but because of racial prejudice was unable to practise law.

Armed with a printing background and academic credentials, he converted a $25 investment into the Chicago Defender Newspaper. With the assistance of J. Hockley Smiley, The Chicago Defender became the literary domain for racial advancement.

The Defender actively promoted the northward migration of Black Southerners, particularly to Chicago.

Its columns not only reported on the movement, but helped to bring about 1917’s “Great Northern Drive,” a term coined
by Abbott himself.

By the early 20s, The Defender’s circulation reached more than 200,000 people. Distribution of the paper was facilitated
by Black railroad porters who both read and shared The Defender. The Defender wrote of injustices but also of a spirit that represented unapologetic Black pride, dignity and assertiveness.

The newspaper also fostered literary careers. At 17, Gwendolyn Brooks started submitting her work to “Lights and Shadows,” the newspaper’s poetry column, and eventually published almost a hundred poems there. Willard Motley and Langston Hughes were just a few of the other big names for whom the Defender was a literary home.

The first issue of the Chicago Defender appeared on May 5, 1905. Abbott printed, folded, and then distributed his paper himself. It was 1912 before the Defender acquired its first news stand sales. Abbott canvassed every black gathering place in the community, selling his paper, soliciting advertising, and collecting news.

His rounds, which he continued even after he could rely on others to distribute his papers, gave him great insight into the concerns of Chicago’s black community. In spite of Abbott’s hard work and personal sacrifice, the paper nearly closed down after a few months.

At this point, his landlady, Henrietta Plumer Lee, made a decisive intervention. She allowed him to use the dining room in her second-floor apartment at 3159 State Street as an office for the newspaper. The newspaper began to prosper, and eventually took over the whole building at the address that became its headquarters for 15 years.

Just one month before the stock market crash of 1929, Abbott launched the first well-financed attempt to publish a black magazine, Abbott’s Monthly. The monthly initially succeeded, but in 1933 it fell victim to the massive black unemployment caused by the nation’s dire economic situation.

In the next three years, Abbott became very ill and was in the office for only 20 months. In 1933 he was found to have tuberculosis, the disease that had killed his birth father.

In addition, he became so myopic that others had to read to him. At the end of his life he was almost permanently confined to bed. Abbott ultimately died of a combination of tuberculosis and Bright’s disease on February 29, 1940. Married twice, Abbott had no children. (Encyclopedia.com)