The Defender

Before the civil rights movement had a national stage, the Chicago Defender was giving a voice to Black Americans who had none in the public arena. The paper spoke out against Jim Crow laws, helped spark the Great Migration northward, and organized Black voters into a political force.

Robert S. Abbott launched the paper in 1905. Its copies reached the most remote Black communities across the segregated South, many of them slipped in despite efforts to keep them out. Abbott's fortune made him one of the first Black millionaires in the country. Under his successor, the paper's influence grew to the point that it helped elect city mayors and US presidents. Harry S. Truman and John F. Kennedy both benefited, and Kennedy's narrow 1960 victory is often credited in part to the paper's backing.

Author Ethan Michaeli draws on dozens of interviews and extensive archival research to trace race in America through this one publication. The book follows the reporters who risked lynch mobs and police violence to get the news out, moving from the era of Theodore Roosevelt to the presidency of Barack Obama.