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Go North

But Robert Abbott, unlike Boston-reared Trotter, was born and reared in Savannah, Ga., and educated at Hampton Institute of Virginia. He knew that no amount of cursing and protesting and demanding alone would improve the plight of black people as long as they remained in the South. The answer, as he saw it, was to get as many black people as possible out of the South. And he launched his campaign to bring them North.
By the time his campaign get [[got]] well underway, World War I had begun and there arose a demand in the North for black workers to help man the steel mills, stockyards, and other industries. During and following the war, Abbott's Chicago Defender carried red headlines week after week, reading: "Negroes are Coming North by the Thousands."
Largely, it has been the voting leverage of blacks in the North that has made the difference in civil rights advance. And Abbott and his Defender are rated the most significant black journalistic achievement of the first half of the 20th century.
His paper - now directed by one of his nephews, John H. Sengstacke, has become one of three black dailies in continental U.S. The other three are the Atlanta Daily World, founded by W. A. Scott in 1932, the New York Challenger, launched in March by Thomas H. Watkins, Jr. of the New York Recorder.
In addition to the Defender, Sengstacke owns the New Pittsburgh Courier, The Michigan Chronicle, and the Memphis Tri-State Defender.
John Murphy's Baltimore Afro-American was expanded into a chain by his sons Carl and Arnett and other members of the family. The chain includes Afro-American in Newark, Richmond, and Washington which absorbed the Washington Tribune.