The Defender: How the Legendary Black Newspaper Changed America

This "extraordinary history" of the influential black newspaper is "deeply researched, elegantly written [and] a towering achievement" (Brent Staples, New York Times Book Review).

In 1905, Robert S. Abbott started printing The Chicago Defender, a newspaper dedicated to condemning Jim Crow and encouraging African Americans living in the South to join the Great Migration. Smuggling hundreds of thousands of copies into the most isolated communities in the segregated South, Abbott gave voice...