Robert Sengstacke Abbott was an African-American lawyer, newspaper publisher and editor. He was the founder of The Chicago Defender.
Background
Robert Sengstacke Abbott was born on November 28, 1868 at Frederica, St. Simon's Island, Georgia, United States. He was the first son and second child of former slave parents, Thomas and Flora (Butler) Abbott. His father died shortly after the boy was born, and when he was five years old his mother married John Hermann Henry Sengstacke, the owner of a general store in Savannah, who was the half-white son of a slave mother and a German father. She bore him seven children.
From his stepfather, who subsequently became a schoolteacher and Congregational clergyman, young Abbott developed a passion for the cause of Negro citizenship.
Education
After early schooling at Beach Institute in Savannah, Abbott spent a brief time at Claflin University, Orangeburg, South Carolina, and went on to Hampton Institute in Virginia, from which he graduated in 1896. At Hampton he trained as a printer, sang in the glee club, and acquired an idol, Booker T. Washington, the principal of Tuskegee Institute, who often returned to Hampton, his alma mater, and talked with the students. In 1897 Abbott entered the Kent College of Law in Chicago, from which he received the degree of Bachelor of Laws in 1899. While there he began to use his stepfather's surname as a middle name.
He received honorary degrees from Morris Brown University in 1923 and Wilberforce University in 1924.
Career
A Negro friend advised Abbott that it would be difficult for so dark-skinned a colored lawyer to practise before the Chicago courts, and his legal aspirations came to a sudden end. He returned to his first love, printing, in which he had labored briefly for the Savannah Echo. His Hampton training and his extended experience with his stepfather's Woodville (Georgia) Times equipped him for the several printing-shop jobs he obtained in Chicago.
The idea of a newspaper of his own took root, and he started a daily which, however, died in its first week. On May 15, 1905, fired by a gnawing zeal to give the Negro a forceful instrument for the improvement of his lot, he launched the four-page, handbill-size Chicago Defender from his State Street living quarters with a total capital of twenty-five cents. Half a century later the newspaper, self-styled the "World's Greatest Weekly, " was still running without a break in continuity while many other local Negro newspapers in the United States had failed. He urged his southern readers to pull up stakes and move into the less restrictive atmosphere of the North.
The great migration of nearly a million frustrated and discontented Negroes from the cotton fields and canebrakes into the industrial areas of the East and Middle West which began in 1917 owed much to the encouragement of Abbott's Defender. The paper's bold streamer headlines, simple but arresting cartoons, and highly charged news and editorials captivated its readers, and Abbott became an editor of tremendous influence and appeal. He launched the first newspaper campaign to improve the public conduct of Negroes and worked to raise their cultural level.
By World War I the Defender was a shrill, stentorian voice for the Negro masses with a skyrocketing 230, 000 national circulation. Light-fingered employees, an expensive short-lived magazine, Abbott's Monthly, and the ravages of the depression ate away all of the newspaper's and almost all of Abbott's finances, though in time the newspaper recovered from the debacle. He served the Robert S. Abbott Publishing Company as president and treasurer to the end of his life. Prominence as a publisher brought him membership on the Race Relations Commission appointed by Governor Frank O. Lowden of Illinois in 1919.
In 1932 he was stricken with tuberculosis. Failure to arrest it during his years of business worry, together with an attack of Bright's disease, led to his death eight years later. He was buried in Lincoln Cemetery, Chicago. At the time of his death his fellow journalists could refer to him as the "dean of Negro publishers, " and he had taken rank alongside such figures of his race as Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and W. E. B. DuBois.
Achievements
Religion
Abbott joined the Bahá'í Faith in 1934.
Politics
Abbott considered politicians as suspects, and he frowned upon political favor.
Views
Quotations:
"American race prejudice must be destroyed!"
Personality
Abbott was a stocky man of medium build, somber, highly self-contained, and calm, often silent and brooding. He was generous to a fault but had his miserly moments. He was at once suspicious and emulative of white society.
A family man, he had an endless interest in people and frequently could be found hobnobbing with friend or stranger on the streets bordering his Indiana Avenue newspaper plant.
Connections
At fifty came the first of Abbott's two childless marriages in September 1918 to Helen (Thornton) Morrison, a widow of Athens, Georgia. They were divorced in June 1933, and in the following summer he married Edna Rose (Brown) Denison, widowed mother of four adult children.