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Robert S. Abbott

Personal Profile

Robert S. Abbott
  • Birth Name:
    Robert Sengstacke Abbott
  • Date of Birth:
    November 24, 1868
  • Zodiac Sign:
    Sagittarius
  • Place of Birth:
    St. Simons Island, GA
  • Place of Death:
    Chicago, IL
  • Date of Death:
    February 29, 1940
  • Sex:
    Male
  • Nationality:
    American
  • Religion:
    Unknown
  • Education:

    Beach Institute of Freedmen’s Bureau, Savannah, GA

    Claflin University

    BS, Hampton University

    Chicago-Kent College of Law

Family

Robert S. Abbott
  • Father:
    Thomas Abbott
  • Mother:
    Flora Butler
  • Brother:
    John Sengstacke Jr. , Alexander Sengstacke
  • Sister:
    Mary Sengstacke, Rebecca Sengstacke, Eliza Sengstacke ,
  • Spouse:
    Helen Thornton Morrison Sengstacke, Edna Denison Sengstacke

Career

Robert S. Abbott

Trivia

Robert S. Abbott
  • In the 1920s, the Defender added a special page just for kids, called the Bud Billiken Page, which led to the Bud Billiken Parade and Picnic, a huge family-oriented progression.
  • He purchased a new home as a gift for the landlady who had saved the paper years earlier, and according to legend he provided a small stipend to the white family that had owned his father, but had since fallen on hard times.
  • Largely due to the Defender, Chicago's black population more than tripled in the 1910s and '20s.
  • Published in Chicago but distributed nationwide, Abbott's Defender spoke forcefully against lynching, racism, and segregation, and urged Southern blacks to migrate north, where racism was less blatant and job opportunities more plentiful.
  • In 1905 he started the Chicago Defender, a weekly newspaper with Abbott as its only staff member, laid out on his kitchen table for a press run of only 300 copies.
  • As a young man he worked as a printer and school teacher before attending law school, but after graduating he was unable to earn much of a living few blacks were able to pay an attorney, and fewer whites willing to hire a black lawyer.
  • Robert S. Abbott's parents had been slaves, freed by the Civil War.

Biography

Robert S. Abbott
Last Updated: Tuesday, September 15, 2009

Robert S. Abbott was born in 1870 in Frederica, St. Simons Island, Georgia of former slave parents, and studied the printing trade at Hampton Institute from 1892 to 1896. He received a law degree from Kent College of Law, Chicago in 1898, but because of race prejudice in the United States was unable to practice, despite attempts to establish law offices in Gary, Indiana, Topeka, Kansas, and Chicago, Illinois.

In 1905 he founded The Chicago Defender with an initial investment of 25 cents. The Defender, which was once heralded as &quote;The World's Greatest Weekly&quote;, soon became the most widely circulated black newspaper in the country, and made Abbott one of the first self-made millionaires of African American descent. Abbott also published a short-lived paper called Abbott's Monthly. He died of Bright's disease on February 29, 1940, and left the paper in the control of his heir and nephew, John Henry Sengstacke.

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