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The Chicago Defender is one of the largest and most influential African American newspapers in the U.S. Some called it radical and dangerous. That's because as early as 1920 it demanded racial equality, particularly in the South, in jobs, housing and transportation and preached black empowerment and black self-reliance. The paper published incendiary editorials with messages such as, "When the white fiends come to the door to kill you, shoot them down. When the white mob comes, take at least one with you." But did the Defender maintain this aggressive stance some forty years later, in 1968, for instance, at a time when the civil rights movement was spreading across the country? To gain a true sense of history one must study the lion in winter as well as in spring. Thus this research examines what editorial positions the Defender took in 1968 and how readers responded through letters to the editor.
There is arguably a mythological narrative surrounding the Chicago Defender, one of the largest and most influential African American' newspapers in the United States. The poet Langston Hughes described the newspaper as "the journalistic voice of a largely voiceless people."2 In the 1920s the Defender had a paid circulation of 250,000 and was a must-read for many African Americans, especially in the Deep South.3 In that part of the country the paper was often banned from newsstands because of what historian Theodore Kornweibel called its "dangerous" demands for racial equality.4 Historian James Grossman says the Defender would print incendiary editorials with a message such as, "When the white fiends come to the door to kill you, shoot them down. When the white mob comes, take at least one with you." Those were things, Grossman said, that an African American Southern newspaper couldn't write because the newspaper would get torched or the editors would be run out of town. "But the Chicago Defender could say it and did," Grossman wrote. "And so black Southerners came to see the paper and its editor, Robert Abbott, as a man they could trust."3
Documentary filmmaker Stanley Nelson said any Southern readers brave enough to be seen publicly reading the Defender in the 1920s were often harassed by segregationists because of the paper's militant calls for civil...