Chicago Defender

Robert S. Abbott started the Chicago Defender in 1905 with a press run of 300 copies. Within a decade it had become the country's most widely read Black newspaper, thanks in part to a distribution system that used Pullman railroad porters to smuggle copies into the Deep South. The Defender ran graphic accounts of lynchings and racial violence alongside ads for northern jobs, helping fuel the Great Migration. Federal agents during World War I called it "the most dangerous of all Negro journals." Digitized pages provided by Library of Congress, Chronicling America.