Ethan Michaeli. The Defender

Ethan Michaeli’s The Defender: How the Legendary Black Newspaper Changed America lives up to its title. In over five hundred pages, Michaeli offers a fascinating history of an African American institution that stirred broad social forces, encouraged the fight for equal rights and opportunity, shaped cultural developments, and served as a model for black enterprise. Surprisingly, though countless scholars have used the Chicago Defender as a source and historians have detailed its impact in specific eras, the newspaper has not been the subject of a thorough biography. Written with verve, Michaeli’s book is a grand narrative history, taking a life-and-times approach that emphasizes the personalities who made the Defender such an important institution. It covers the newspaper from its emergence early in the twentieth century until the present day. The first part of the book is the most dramatic. Here, Michaeli explains the origins of the vision for the Defender. The decisive moment was the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Robert Abbott, who had grown up in Georgia, was a tenor in the Hampton Quartet, which performed at the fair. On Colored American Day, in the capstone to a program that highlighted African American achievement, he heard Frederick Douglass rail against racism. “I will stay out here in the West,” Abbott prophesied in a letter to his family, “and try and make a fortune” (3).

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