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  • Black Stories MatterHow the Defender Gave Voice to a Century
  • Samuel G. Freedman (bio)
The Defender: How the Legendary Black Newspaper Changed America.
By Ethan Michaeli.
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016.
633p. HB, $32.

During the summer of 2013, shortly after George Zimmerman was acquitted of the fatal shooting of an unarmed black teenager named Trayvon Martin, word leaked out that a juror was already shopping around a prospective book about the case. One particular Twitter user, Genie Lauren, was so outraged that she logged on to condemn the literary agent who was representing the juror. As Lauren later explained, “I didn’t think it was right that someone would make money off of this tragedy.” Almost immediately, thousands of other people began tweeting at the agent, a protest petition circulated online, and the book project was dropped.

By some readings of recent history, this episode marked the emergence of Black Twitter, a term that refers to the concentrated, effective, and proudly parochial use of the social-media platform by African Americans. In the years since the Zimmerman trial, Black Twitter has been an information-sharing and opinion-shaping phenomenon for everything from the BET Awards to the Michael Brown killing in Ferguson, Missouri. Black Twitter, of course, gave birth to the hashtag that became a slogan that became a movement: #BlackLivesMatter.

The temptation in assessing a seeming innovation like Black Twitter is to mistake the newness of the technology for the oldness of the message. If Black Twitter is nothing else, it is the digital revolution’s manifestation of the great African-American newspapers of the twentieth century. These periodicals similarly gave voice to the experiences of millions of black Americans and very deliberately effaced the traditional journalistic line between uninflected reportage and clearly labeled opinion. (Let’s leave aside for this essay the question of whether “objectivity” has ever been more than a myth.)

Arguably the finest and most influential of the African-American newspapers was the Chicago Defender, and its history is the subject of Ethan Michaeli’s important, eloquent, and [End Page 211] sometimes flawed book. A kind of institutional biography, The Defender: How The Legendary Black Newspaper Changed America traces the paper’s trajectory for the hundred years since its maiden issue in 1905. For virtually all of that time, the Defender expressed the vision of two men—its founding publisher, Robert S. Abbott, and the nephew who succeeded him, John Sengstacke.

The arc of the Abbott and Sengstacke years includes many of the landmark events in postbellum black America, from the Great Migration to the Double Victory campaign to the Emmett Till murder to the Selma marches to the early political career of one Barack Obama. The centrality of Chicago itself in African-American history allows Michaeli to tell a broad story, at times even international in implications, from a tightly defined focal place, the Defender’s newsroom in the South Side neighborhood known as Bronzeville.

Michaeli has made a major contribution to journalistic history as well as to African-American history. His book provides detailed and insightful portraits not only of Abbott and Sengstacke but of some of their most accomplished reporters and editors, including Ethel Payne and Louis Martin Jr. In compelling set pieces on such topics as Abbott’s feud with Marcus Garvey and Sengstacke’s complex relationship with the elder Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago, the author embeds in narrative action the newspaper’s guiding ethos. As Michaeli writes of Abbott, “[H]e was a radical proponent of interracialism and committed to the eradication of the laws and customs of discrimination as embodied in the first plank of The Defender’s Platform for America: ‘American Race Prejudice Must Be Destroyed.’ It was a creed that stood in opposition to…racial separatism and black nationalism… one that was as pragmatic as it was forgiving.”

For a moment in time, a moment that lasted decades, the Defender brought its combination of activism and respectability to a massive audience. A groundbreaking black student who had been inspired by hearing an aging Frederick Douglass speak, Abbott started the Defender on such shaky financial ground that at one point he had to...

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