Suppressed at first by poverty, then later by vigilante groups in the South which sought to halt distribution of his Chicago Defender, Robert Sengstacke Abbott nevertheless continued to publish his newspaper from 1905, when he was thirty seven years old, until his death in 1940. In establishing the Defender, Abbott changed the character of the black press. The Defender abandoned a strictly rhetorical political style, adopted the sensational makeup and headlines of Hearst and Pulitzer fame, and imitated the old motto of the New York Sun, "If you see it in the Defender, it's so!" Abbott encouraged pride in being black. He wanted blacks to demand economic and political rights, and he beckoned to Southern blacks to come out of the land of oppression and to seek the pure light of freedom in the North. For many blacks in the early 1900s, the Defender was the sole link to a...