Voices of Freedom: Robert S. Abbott

Highlighting Juneteenth

Robert S. Abbott

(1870-1940)

Lawyer, Editor, Publisher

“No greater glory, no greater honor, is the lot of man departing than a feeling deep in his heart that the world is a better place for his having lived.”

Robert Sengstacke Abbott was born in Georgia, to parents who were Gulla-speaking freedmen from the Georgia Sea Islands. His father died when he was an infant, and he was raised by his mother, Flora, and his step-father, John Sengstacke, a mixed-race immigrant from Germany who was a Congregationalist minister and newspaper publisher.

In the summer of 1893, while he was learning the printing trade at the Hampton Institute, Robert worked at the World Columbian Fair in Chicago. There, he met Frederick Douglass, who inspired him to study law. In 1898, he earned his law degree at Chicago’s Kent College of Law.

In 1905, Abbott started the Chicago Defender. Operating on a shoestring, the first issues of the weekly Defender were printed on the dining-room table of his boarding house. The Defender quickly rose in circulation and influence, with bundles of papers being carried South by Pullman porters after segregationists attempted to block its distribution. Abbott’s vision was of an America free of racial prejudice of any sort. The Defender encouraged the migration of blacks to the North, and defended them in their new northern homes; and at the same time made Abbott a wealthy man.

Abbott remained publisher of the Defender to his death in 1940. The Defender is still being published to this day.

Ethan Michaeli’s book, The Defender, on Robert Abbott and his paper is available from the Kenosha Public Library.