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Between 1877 and 1900, about 150 black newspapers came into being to protest mob violence, lynchings, the total abrogation of the 14th and 15th amendments and only half observance of the 13th.

Still Going
The leading black papers of this dark period were: The Washington Bee, established in 1879 by Attorney William Calvin Chase; the Cleveland Gazette, launched in 1883 by Harry C. Smith; the Philadelphia Tribune, founded by Chris J. Perry, a successful realtor, in 1884. This 88-year-old paper, now under the leadership of the able Eustace Gray, is one of five that still survive from the 19th century.

Other outstanding papers of the era were: Timothy Thomas Fortune's New York Age, John Mitchell's Richmond Planet, Sol Johnson's Savannah Tribune, Phillip Bell and W. J. Powell's San Francisco Elevator, Nick Chiles' Topeka Plaindealer, John Murphy's Afro-American which, along with the Indianapolis Recorder, the New Iowa Bystandar, and the Houston Informer and Texas Freeman, are the other four that are still going.
Harvard-educated William Monroe Trotter practically opened the 20th century with his Boston Guardian. Much like Rev. T. J. Smith's Pittsburgh Broad-Axe, it let the chips fall where they may.

The Guardian was soon followed by Robert Sengstacke Abbott's Chicago Defender in 1905, P. B. Young's Norfolk Journal and Guide, James Anderson's Amsterdam News, Robert L. Vann's Pittsburgh Courier, Rascoe Dungee's Oklahoma Black Dispatch, and Joseph and William Mitchell's St. Louis Argus.

With the departure of George White of North Carolina from the Congress in 1901, the long night of disenfranchisement, nurtured by the Ku Klux Klan and his grandfather clauses in state constitutions, set in for 27 years.

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 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 the 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, Sengstacks owns the New Pittsburgh Courier, The Michigan Chroncile, 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.

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Mayor Harold Washington of Chicago, Ben Hooks of NAACP and Mayor Hatcher of Gary, Indiana were banquet speakers.

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