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Busting Out: African-American Culture from the 1954 Republican Lincoln Day Box Supper to the 1955 Emmett Till Lynching as Documented by the Chicago Defender

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

James M. Salem
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Extract

Black newspapers began to compete with the church as an institution influential in shaping black public opinion as early as 1878 in Chicago and, by World War II, according to the authors of Black Metropolis, they represented “one of the most powerful forces among Negroes in America.” The most prominent and influential of these weekly newspapers was the Chicago Defender, founded in 1905 by Robert S. Abbott, the “son of slaves,” who was encouraged to believe by his minister-stepfather that “a newspaper was one of the strongest weapons a Negro could have in the defense of his race.” Abbott, his biographer contends, “was one of the first Negroes in the United States to become a millionaire — and, in the process, he revolutionized the Negro press, today [1955] the greatest single force in the Negro world.” Though Abbott would have been proud of the compliment, he would not have printed it in his paper because during his lifetime the Defender was not permitted to use the terms Negro or black. Abbott preferred Race, Race men, and Race women.

Type
Research Article
Information
Prospects , Volume 29 , October 2005 , pp. 541 - 562
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2005

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References

Notes

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