By November of 1929, according to the National Urban League column in The Chicago Defender, unemployment had affected African American workers all over the nation.
In just three years from 1919–1922, the Defender also attracted the writing talents of Langston Hughes and Gwendolyn Brooks.
The Editor and founder Robert Sengstacke Abbott played a major role in influencing the Great Migration of African Americans from the rural South to the urban North by means of strong, moralistic rhetoric in his editorials and political cartoons, the promotion of Chicago as a destination, and the advertisement of successful black individuals as inspiration for blacks in the South. The rhetoric and art exhibited in the Defender unmistakably demanded equality of the races and the promotion of a northern migration. The first step Abbott took to achieve this end was to create a necessary sense of oppression and discontentment in southern life, accomplished through the exposés of southern crimes against blacks. The Defender consistently published articles describing lynchings in the south with vivid descriptions of gore and the victims’ deaths. These stories were accompanied by unrestrained blame of the mobs of whites typically involved, forcing readers to accept that these crimes were “systematic and unremitting”. The newspaper’s intense focus on these injustices implicitly laid the groundwork upon which Abbott would build his explicit critiques of society.
The art in the Defender, particularly its political cartoons, also explicitly addressed race issues and advocated northern migration of blacks.
After the movement of southern blacks northward was a quantifiable phenomenon, the Defender took a particular interest in sensationalizing migratory stories, often portraying them as the focus of the front page. Abbott positioned his paper as a primary influence of these movements even before historians would, for he used the Defender to initiate and advertise a “Great Northern Drive” day, set for May 15, 1917.
The promotion of Chicago as an attractive destination for the migration of southern blacks was a main function of the Defender. Abbott presented Chicago as a promised-land with abundant jobs, as he included advertisements "clearly aimed at southerners" that called for massive numbers of wanted workers in factory positions. The Defender was littered with advertisements for desirable commodities, beauty products and technological devices. Interestingly, Abbott’s paper was the first black newspaper to incorporate a full entertainment section, which allowed for the culture of Chicago to be intricately elaborated upon. Chicago was portrayed as a lively city where blacks commonly went to the theaters, ate out at fancy restaurants, attended sports events, including "cheering for the American Black Giants, black America’s favorite baseball team", and could dance all night in the hottest night clubs.
The Defender featured letters and poetry sent in from successful recent migrants; these writings "served as representative anecdotes, supplying readers with prototype examples … that characterized the migration campaign". To supplement these first-person accounts, Abbott often published small features on successful blacks in Chicago.
In 1923, founding publisher Robert Sengstacke Abbott and editor Lucius Harper created the Bud Billiken Club and later organized parades to promote healthy activity among black children in Chicago. In 1929 the organization began the Bud Billiken Parade and Picnic, which is still held annually in Chicago in early August. In the 1950s, under Abbott's direction, the Bud Billiken Parade expanded and emerged as the largest single event in Chicago. Today, it attracts more than one million attendance with more than 25 million television viewers,` making it one of the largest parades in the country.
Abbott's nephew, John H. Sengstacke, took over the Defender in 1940. In 1948, he encouraged President Harry S. Truman to integrate the armed services, which he did soon after. Sengstacke served as a member of Truman's appointed committee to assure that the military implemented this plan.
Sengstacke also brought together for the first time major black newspaper publishers and created the National Negro Publishers Association, later renamed the National Newspaper Publishers Association (NNPA). Today the NNPA consists of over 200 member black newspapers. Two days following the publishers' first meeting in Chicago, Abbott died.
One of Sengstacke's most striking accomplishments occurred on February 6, 1956, when the Defender became a daily newspaper and changed its name to the Chicago Daily Defender, the nation's second black daily newspaper. It published as a daily until 2003, when new owners converted the Defender back to a weekly. The Defender was one of only three African-American dailies in the United States; the other two are the Atlanta Daily World, the first black newspaper founded as a daily in 1928, and the New York Daily Challenge, founded in 1971.
Control of the Chicago Defender and her sister publications was transferred to a new ownership group named Real Times Inc. in January 2003. Real Times, Inc. was organized and led by Thom Picou, and Robert (Bobby) Sengstacke, John H. Sengstacke's surviving child and father of the beneficiaries of the Sengstacke Trust. In effect, Picou, then chairman and CEO of Real Times, Inc., led what was then labeled a "Sengstacke family-led" deal to facilitate trust beneficiaries and other Sengstacke family shareholders to agree to the sale of the company. Picou recruited Sam Logan, former publisher of the Michigan Chronicle, who then recruited O'Neil Swanson, Bill Pickard, Ron Hall and Gordon Follmer, black businessman from Detroit, Michigan (the "Detroit Group"), as investors in Real Times. Chicago investors included Picou, Bobby Sengstacke, David M. Milliner (who served as publisher of the Chicago Defender from 2003 to 2004), Kurt Cherry and James Carr.
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