The defender : how the legendary Black newspaper changed America : from the age of the Pullman porters to the age of Obama

652 Pages·2016·6.09 MB·English

by  Michaeli

Contents
Title Page
Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Preface: Delphi on the Prairie
A Defender of His Race
If You See It in The Defender, It’s So
Getting the South Told
The Great Northern Drive
The Greatest Disturbing Element
The Bonds of Affections
Reaping the Whirlwind
Bombing Binga
Chicago Vindicated
The Burdens of the Future
We’ll Take the Sea
Farewell Chief
Victory Through Unity

Photos
Santa Claus and a World War
Promises vs. Performance
The Daily Defender
One Vote per Precinct
A Socratic Gadfly
A Prayer for Chicago
A Dark Hour in the Life of America
The Last Remains of Nonviolence
Victories Are Contagious
Stick Around for a While
The Roar of the El Train
Acknowledgments
Notes
Sources
Index
About the Author
Copyright © 2016 by Ethan Michaeli
All rights reserved
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write
to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.
www.hmhco.com
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Michaeli, Ethan.
The defender : how the legendary black newspaper changed America : from the
age of the Pullman porters to the age of Obama / Ethan Michaeli.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-547-56069-4 (hardback)—ISBN 978-0-547-56087-8 (ebook)
1. Chicago defender—History. 2. African Americans—Illinois—Chicago—
Newspapers. 3. African American newspapers—Illinois—Chicago—History. 4.
African American press—Illinois—Chicago—History. I. Title.
PN4899.C395D55 2016
071.73'11—dc23
2015017437
Cover design by Patrick Barry
Cover photograph courtesy © Wayne Miller/Magnum Photos
v1.0116
For my beloved parents, Chana and Avri, who taught me with their words
and deeds that all women and men are equal in talent and ability, and that
there should be no borders between us.
Preface: Delphi on the Prairie
THE SKIES WERE clear over the North American prairie on Saturday, August 14,
2004. A summer sun rose across the blue expanse of Lake Michigan and crept
along the city’s sandy beaches until it hit the glittering ridge of skyscrapers
downtown and then filtered into the neighborhoods beyond.
Very early that morning, a stream of people began to converge on the city’s
South Side, on a tree-lined boulevard that had gone by several names in its long
history but was now Martin Luther King Drive. Some walked, but mostly they
came in cars, buses, and on the city’s El trains. They came from all across the
metropolitan area and well beyond, from the luxury high-rises dominating
Chicago’s coast and the Bungalow Belt neighborhoods on the South and West
Sides, from stately homes in the suburbs, and from the housing projects nearby.
A fair number arrived after long journeys from other states, from the South and
the West Coast as well as New York and other points east.
By 10:00 a.m., more than a million people had gathered, nearly all of them
African American. They filled the fairways, side lanes, lawns, and balconies of
King Drive, setting up tents and grills on spots that many families had claimed
every year for decades. It was the seventy-fifth year Chicago’s black community
had gathered for the Bud Billiken Parade, and everyone knew that this was a day
set aside for wholesome fun and remembrance.
The Bud Billiken Parade was the brainchild of Robert Sengstacke Abbott,
founder of The Chicago Defender, the newspaper that had chronicled and
catalyzed this community’s greatest accomplishments for nearly a century. At
the height of the newspaper’s circulation and influence, Abbott had devised the
parade to give African American children a sense of pride and dignity, and even
three-quarters of a century later, there were still a few old-timers in the crowd
who remembered him in his later years when, ravaged by illness but still
impeccably dressed, he waved to the crowds from the balcony of his home, a
brick-and-stone mansion that still stands on the parade route just south of Forty-
Seventh Street.
For decades, the Billiken Parade, named for a long-forgotten figurine plucked
at random from an editor’s desk, had attracted black America’s greatest
celebrities and athletes, from Duke Ellington to James Brown, from Joe Louis to
Muhammad Ali. But along with the food, socializing, and entertainment, the
Billiken was also a day for politics. Elected officials and those seeking office
from across the nation, white and black, Democrats and Republicans, knew that
the parade was a necessary campaign stop, a singular opportunity to make a
pitch for Chicago’s all-important black vote, and they lobbied the organizers
intensely to secure their place among the marching bands, military units,
corporate floats, and neighborhood dance troupes. Black Chicago’s electorate,
politicians knew, was unified, organized, and savvy, fully informed by The
Defender.1 Historically, the community had played a decisive role both as
kingmaker and spoiler in innumerable campaigns for mayor, governor, senator,
and even president.
It was a political tradition that went back to the days when African Americans
voted Republican in honor of Abraham Lincoln, and continued through their
conversion into New Deal Democrats. Even in the decades when the African
American vote was suppressed in the rest of the country, Chicago’s Bronzeville
had elected their own sons and daughters as county officials, state legislators,
aldermen, and congressmen. In more recent years, they had elected the city’s
first black mayor, Harold Washington, and Carol Moseley Braun, the nation’s
first black woman U.S. senator. On this particular parade day, however, the
community would get the chance to inspect a rising star unlike any they had
propelled before: Barack Obama, a little-known state legislator and first-time
candidate for the U.S. Senate, then just forty-three years old.
Three weeks earlier, Obama had delivered an electrifying keynote speech at
the Democratic National Convention in Boston, and even though he had yet to
win the upcoming race for the Senate, some were already urging him to seek the
presidency. But victory in November would be determined by whether
Chicago’s black community would come out en masse to the polls, a reality that
made this Billiken Parade nothing less than a crucial test of Obama’s support.
Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle, cruised up Martin Luther King Drive on a
float surrounded by a phalanx of hundreds of supporters in matching blue-and-
white T-shirts, carrying signs emblazoned withOBAMA FOR SENATE. All along the
parade route, the crowds roared as the candidate passed. At every point where he
stopped to shake hands, the people erupted in chants of “O-Ba-Ma,” flashing
homemade banners as well as official campaign signs.
Struck by the crowd’s enthusiasm, a television reporter, a veteran of many
Billiken parades, asked the candidate when he disembarked for an interview,
“Where in the world did all these Obama signs come from?”
“We did pretty good on signage today,” Obama answered, smiling cheekily.
“We’ve just had wonderful support. This is obviously my home area here.” Then
he added, “It’s nice to come back to the South Side.”2
Obama’s eventual Republican opponent in the 2004 campaign, the former
diplomat Alan Keyes, was also participating in the Billiken, though with
decidedly different results. Not from Illinois and seriously underfunded, Keyes
had been recruited by desperate Republicans after their first candidate’s
implosion following a sex scandal. To the Billiken crowd, Keyes, who was
African American, seemed a cynical choice to run against Obama, with many
clearly suspecting that his ethnicity was the operative, if not only, qualification
for his selection. If there was one thing this crowd did not like, it was being
pandered to. For much of the parade, Keyes remained inside his car, subjected to
frequent booing and heckling. On one of the rare moments Keyes did emerge, a
woman confronted him and waved a placard in his face, shouting at the top of
her lungs, “Obama for President. Obama for President.”3
By 2004, the Billiken Parade was the most enduring part of Robert Abbott’s
legacy, though once upon a time he had built his newspaper’s circulation into the
hundreds of thousands, with fiery editorials under giant red headlines that
chastised southern whites for lynching and other atrocities. In the 1920s and ’30s
he was even dubbed the Moses of Black America for the role The Defender
played in motivating the multitudes to leave Dixie for the Promised Land of
America’s northern cities. Some sixty thousand came to Chicago during World
War I alone, doubling the city’s black population and ensuring that The
Defender’s hometown would become the nation’s center of African American
politics, culture, and commerce. Ultimately, what Abbott referred to as the
“Great Northern Drive” would live on in the nation’s consciousness as the Great
Migration.
The early twentieth century was an era even more color-conscious than our
own, and Abbott’s dark complexion caused not only whites but many blacks to
underestimate him. He met such racist assumptions head-on, with a keen
intellect he had sharpened at Hampton College, the alma mater of Booker T.
Washington, where he became a “race man,” part of a generation of activists
who infused unwavering patriotism into their struggle for civil rights. Abbott
preached and exemplified the American values of self-reliance and capitalist
success, along with the constitutional gospel of freedom of speech and legal
equality. Ignoring death threats and circumventing southern authorities who tried
to ban his young newspaper, he drafted Pullman porters, the famed valets of the
interstate train system, to smuggle bundles across the Mason-Dixon Line and sell
subscriptions.
Abbott died in 1940 and was succeeded by his nephew John H. Sengstacke,
who took The Defender to even greater heights during his five decades in
command. During World War II, Sengstacke staffed the newspaper with an
international, interracial roster of writers that included poet Langston Hughes
and public intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois, turning it into a journalistic champion
of universal human rights. In 1956 Sengstacke made The Defender a daily,
competing with white-owned newspapers and broadcast media for coverage of
the “race beat,” just as Martin Luther King Jr. was shifting the civil rights
movement into high gear.
In 1960 Sengstacke dispatched his protégé Louis Martin to the campaign of
John F. Kennedy and then worked closely with Martin and the black press to
energize the African American electorate around the country. It was Martin who
suggested that JFK call Coretta Scott King during one of Dr. King’s
incarcerations, a gesture of support that swayed the black vote in the days
leading up to the election and proved decisive to the victory over Richard M.
Nixon.
In the ’70s, The Defender lost circulation and influence, pinched on one side
by a black power movement that saw the newspaper as too accommodating to
the white establishment, and on the other by the large daily newspapers and
television stations suddenly embracing integration, which to them meant
siphoning off black journalists as well as black readers. Sengstacke maintained
the symbolic power of The Defender as long as he lived, but after his death in
1997 the paper’s influence ebbed, a process that accelerated after it was sold in
2002.
By 2004, the year Obama ran for the U.S. Senate, many of those who had
played key roles at The Defender for decades had moved their focus to the
Billiken Parade. Eugene Scott, a distant relative of the AbbottSengstacke clan
who had served as publisher of The Defender until the sale, had become
president of the Chicago Defender Charities, with overall responsibility for
organizing the parade. Called “Colonel” by most of the parade staff, Scott had
served two tours in Vietnam and was a U.S. Army base commander before he
came to The Defender. He was the calm center in the chaotic storm of the day’s
events.
From his command post in the reviewing stand at the entrance of Washington
Park, the Colonel could see much of the parade route down the slight incline on
King Drive, and he could not help but notice the wave of enthusiasm as Obama’s
float approached. He knew the Billiken crowd was not supporting Obama simply