The Chicago Defender will cease print operations next week, ending a storied 114-year newspaper legacy that included driving the Great Migration of African Americans to Chicago from the South and bolstering the black electorate as a key constituency in national politics.
Wednesday marks the final physical edition from the Defender’s Bronzeville newsroom, its executives announced Friday, with the outlet switching to a digital-only platform on Thursday.
”Under the print version, we could not reach people where they live and work,” said Hiram E. Jackson, CEO of Real Times Media, the Detroit-based black newspaper chain that bought the Defender in 2003. “Being a digital-only outlet will help us reach people who live on the West Side or South Side or south suburbs, giving people what they need when they want it. It makes us more nimble.
”We’re really excited to pave the way to the future in really making sure there is a spot in the future for the black press. We have more newspapers than any other black media company in the country. I see this as our responsibility to show what the future looks like,” Jackson said.
Looking to the past, the Defender’s place in history is unparalleled.
”It was an essential force in American history for the whole of the 20th century,” said University of Chicago lecturer Ethan Michaeli, a former Defender staffer and author of the 2016 book “The Defender: How the Legendary Black Newspaper Changed America.”
Drawn to Chicago from Georgia for the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893 — where he met Frederick Douglass and Ida B. Wells — Robert Sengstacke Abbott founded the Chicago Defender in 1905.
His four-page weekly edition, crafted on his landlady’s dining table, focused on Chicago neighborhood news, highlighted white oppression and the lynchings of African Americans across the South. And he eventually used his editorial page to encourage black Americans to make the journey north. Abbott partnered with Pullman railway porters to turn the paper into “a national communications vehicle for African Americans,” Michaeli said.
”He was the first motivator of the Great Migration. He wasn’t encouraging until he saw it could be a weapon against Jim Crow laws, by depriving the South of a labor force and improving the relative political position of African Americans,” Michaeli said.