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Chicago Defender (1909-2010)

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Searchable full-text and page images from The Chicago Defender archive. 

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All Branch LibrariesSchomburg Center for Research in Black CultureStephen A. Schwarzman BuildingThe New York Public Library for the Performing ArtsThomas Yoseloff Business Center
Historical Newspapers, U.S. Newspapers, Area and Cultural Studies, African American Studies
<p>The Defender was the leading African American news publication before World War I, with more than half of its circulation outside of its home base in Chicago. It will allow researchers to study many significant events in American history that received only cursory attention from other newspapers. During World War I, it successfully urged African-Americans to leave the segregated South to work in the industrial North. It covered the Red Summer Riots of 1919, editorialized for anti-lynching legislation, and published Walter White and Langston Hughes, as well as early works of Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Gwendolyn Brooks. Also searchable through the Black Studies Center database.</p>
English