Robert Abbott Expands Chicago Defender Into National Newspaper Reaching the Deep South

Robert Sengstacke Abbott expanded the Chicago Defender into a national weekly newspaper distributed clandestinely throughout the Jim Crow South, where it was sometimes banned. Black railroad porters smuggled copies to readers across the region. By 1916 the paper had a circulation exceeding 100,000, making it the most widely read Black newspaper in the country and a primary engine of the Great Migration.