Chicago Defender - Role in The Great Migration

Role in The Great Migration

Editor and founder Robert Sengstacke Abbott played a major role in influencing the Great Migration of African Americans from the rural South to the urban North by means of strong, moralistic rhetoric in his editorials and political cartoons, the promotion of Chicago as a destination, and the advertisement of successful black individuals as inspiration for blacks in the South.

The rhetoric and art exhibited in the Defender unmistakably demanded equality of the races and the promotion of a northern migration. It has been suggested that the first step Abbott took to achieve this end was to create a necessary sense of oppression and discontentment in southern life, accomplished through the exposés of southern crimes against blacks. The Defender consistently published articles describing lynchings in the south with vivid descriptions of gore and the victims’ death. These stories were accompanied by unrestrained blame of the mobs of whites typically involved, forcing readers to accept that these crimes were “systematic and unremitting”. The newspaper’s intense focus on these injustices implicitly laid the groundwork upon which Abbott would build his explicit critiques of society.

The art in the Defender, particularly its political cartoons, also explicitly addressed race issues and advocated northern migration of blacks.

After the movement of southern blacks northward was a quantifiable phenomenon, the Defender took a particular interest to sensationalizing migratory stories, often portraying them as the focus of the front page. Abbott positioned his paper as a primary influence of these movements even before historians would, for he used the Defender to initiate and advertise a “Great Northern Drive” day, set for May 15, 1917.

The promotion of Chicago as an attractive destination for the migration of southern blacks was a main function of the Defender. Abbott presented Chicago as a promised-land with abundant jobs, as he included advertisements "clearly aimed at southerners" that called for massive numbers of wanted workers in factory positions. The Defender was littered with advertisements for desirable commodities, beauty products and technological devices. Interestingly, Abbott’s paper was the first black newspaper to incorporate a full entertainment section, which allowed for the culture of Chicago to be intricately elaborated upon. Chicago was portrayed as a lively city where blacks commonly went to the theaters, ate out at fancy restaurants, attended sports events, including "cheering for the American Black Giants, black America’s favorite baseball team", and could dance all night in the hottest night clubs.

The Defender featured letters and poetry sent in from successful recent migrants; these writings "served as representative anecdotes, supplying readers with prototype examples … that characterized the migration campaign". To supplement these first-person accounts, Abbott often published small features on successful blacks in Chicago.