Chicago Defender - Continued Historical Influence

Continued Historical Influence

In 1923, founding publisher Robert Sengstacke Abbott and editor Lucius Harper created the Bud Billiken Club and later organized parades to promote healthy activity among black children in Chicago. In 1929 the organization began the Bud Billiken Parade and Picnic, which is still held annually in Chicago in early August. In the 1950s, under Sengstacke's direction, the Bud Billiken Parade expanded and emerged as the largest single event in Chicago. Today, it attracts more than one million attendance with more than 25 million television viewers,` making it one of the largest parades in the country.

Abbott's nephew, John H. Sengstacke, took over the Defender in 1940. In 1948, he encouraged President Harry S. Truman to integrate the armed services, which he did soon after. Sengstacke served as a member of Truman's appointed committee to assure that the military implemented this plan.

Sengstacke also brought together for the first time major black newspaper publishers and created the National Negro Publishers Association, later renamed the National Newspaper Publishers Association (NNPA). Today the NNPA consists of over 200 member black newspapers. Two days following the publishers' first meeting in Chicago, Abbott died.

One of Sengstacke's most striking accomplishments occurred on February 6, 1956, when the Defender became a daily newspaper and changed its name to the Chicago Daily Defender, the nation's second black daily newspaper. It published as a daily until 2003, when new owners converted the Defender back to a weekly. The Defender was one of only three African-American dailies in the United States; the other two are the Atlanta Daily World, the first black newspaper founded as a daily in 1928, and the New York Daily Challenge, founded in 1971.