We’re home! As of this writing, the Chicago Defender newspaper, 104 years young, has moved to its new offices at 4445 S. King Dr.
We’re home! As of this writing, the Chicago Defender newspaper, 104 years young, has moved to its new offices at 4445 S. King Dr.
The Defender has come home to Bronzeville, making the move after three years downtown at 200 S. Michigan Ave.
It is said that a move is one of the most traumatic occurrences in a life. My family and I have personally moved 17 times, from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia; to Lansing, Michigan; St. Louis; Chicago; back to Pittsburgh; and now back to Chicago. Let me tell you, next to a death in the family, a move is traumatic.
It is also traumatic in the life of a newspaper. We get comfortable in our surroundings. We get used to having our stuff right here, the lights right there, our chair facing the door or the window.
Now they’ve moved our stuff, and we have to get used to that as well.
But we’ve moved back home.
The history of the Defender and the history of Bronzeville are inextricably linked. It was the Chicago Defender, under the leadership of founder Robert S. Abbott, who exhorted Black people in the South to come to Chicago and take advantage of the opportunities here. He told southern Blacks that they didn’t have to sharecrop or work the land in a segregated-by-law society.
He summoned them north to Chicago, to Detroit, to Pittsburgh, to get jobs in the factories, with automakers and in the steel mills. He also told them that if they came in great enough numbers, those numbers would create even more opportunities.
The neighborhood now known as Bronzeville was originally the “Black Belt,” west to State Street and east to Cottage Grove. It was, by law, the only place Blacks could live, but they lived well, building institutions and churches and businesses.
As more and more Blacks migrated north, they began to overflow those rigid legal boundaries, leading to violent clashes with the residents of those adjoining white neighborhoods.
The Defender was born in 1906, with founder Robert S. Abbott “defending” those residents of the Black Belt against racial, economic and social discrimination, and boldly speaking out on lynching, mob violence and Black disenfranchisement.”
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