The story of Robert Sengstacke Abbot’s (Nov. 24, 1870–Feb.
29, 1940) life and eventual success in newspaper publishing
epitomizes the challenges educated and enterprising African Americans faced during the Jim Crow and Progressive
eras. It also embodies African American urban journalism
rising by its bootstraps into a million-dollar enterprise in
the twentieth century.
Abbott’s life and entrepreneurship grew from unusual
roots in the most predictable of slave cultures, enhanced by
strict German values and a reasonably strong education and
training for printing and law careers. His shoestring startup
Chicago newspaper, the Chicago Defender (established in
1905) served a neglected black population. It progressed
into a resounding voice against discrimination, advocating
“race” opportunity (he shunned the terms Negro, black, and
Afro-American) and the needs of Chicagoans of color. Its
million-dollar success and added publications supported
both a community and an extended-family dynasty that
continued to produce the Chicago Defender for more than
sixty years after Abbott’s death.
If there ever was a slave aristocracy, Robert Abbott’s
roots (from his father’s side) came from it. His father managed all servants in a Georgia plantation house and his
exemplary dedication and status with the owners was both
his antebellum mainstay and his post-emancipation undoing. Although he treasured his freedom, Thomas Abbott
never could find the status and structure he enjoyed in servitude. Robert’s mother, a dark-skinned hairdresser from the
close-knit and independent Geechee culture of the Georgia
islanders gave Robert the family roots and cultural heritage
visible at times in his adult personality.
Robert’s father died when Robert was four months old.
His light-skinned German mulatto stepfather, John Sengstacke, who became a Congregationalist minister, mentored
him with Calvinist rigor from early childhood. Yet, the
social meaning of light and dark skin—along with cultural
differences from Sengstacke’s German upbringing—stigmatized the family, despite their high standards and education. Abbott experienced the constant discomfort wrought
by his dark skin and the comfort of living in an all-black
community outside of Savannah and visiting relatives on
St. Simons Island in his childhood, where a proud history
of resistance to slavery endured.
Abbott’s first experience working on a newspaper was
with the four-page paper his father began, produced, distributed, and read from the pulpit to parishioners. After
studying unsuccessfully in a light-skin dominated school,
Abbott eventually attended Hampton Institute and spent
eight years there, learning the printing trade, completing
his college degree, and touring with a singing group that
solicited donations for the college.
Color was a constant source of frustration to Abbott.
Even his move to Chicago was tied to rejection in love by
his light-skinned girlfriend’s family, who regarded Robert
as below their daughter’s station for marriage, despite a
life-long acquaintance with him. He had already worked
as a printer’s devil, had labored on his stepfather’s newspaper, and was a trained printer, but his efforts to find gainful
work in skilled printing crafts were frustrated by his skin
color. He earned a diploma in law at Kent College in Chicago, only to find that his dark skin posed too big a risk of
courtroom defeat to prospective partners or clients.
Abbott began The Chicago Defender doing everything but
the printing himself, including selling the two-cent weekly
from door-to-door and person-to-person on the street. By
1929, its circulation had grown to 250,000 and the Defender
had its own building, press, and several departments. It had
risen through typical urban strategies, such as sensationalizing crime and other scandals, but it had also gained enormously from Abbott’s ability to hire good people, including
J. Hockley Smiley in 1910, who managed operations.
Abbott lashed out at Jim Crow and discrimination in the
South and North. He believed the North, and Chicago in particular, offered far more jobs and economic opportunity for
southern blacks than the South and subsequently produced
special promotional issues of The Defender, which he distributed in enormous numbers throughout the South. Thus,
Abbott not only influenced history in the South by using
mass media to spur migration to Chicago, but he provided a
newspaper to inform, lead, entertain, assure and maintain a
community for the newcomers after they arrived. He loudly
objected to the ghettoizing of blacks on Chicago’s South
Side, decried the racial incidents and lynching of the early
twentieth century, and promoted race achievement through
awards and by publishing the work of talented writers and
poets, including Langston Hughes and others.
Further Reading
Doreski, C. K. “From News to History: Robert Abbott and Carl
Sandburg Read the 1919 Chicago Riot.” African American
Review 26, no. 4 (Winter, 1992).
———. Writing America Black: Race Rhetoric and the Public
Sphere. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Herbst, Susan. “Public Expression Outside the Mainstream”
Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social
Science 546, The Media and Politics (July, 1996), 120–131.
Ottley, Roi. The Lonely Warrior: The Life and Times of Robert S.
Abbott. Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1955.
Carmen E. Clark