Ethan Michaeli > Quotes

“Ida Wells-Barnett, Louis Anderson, and John Marshall were just a few of the success stories in an African American community whose size, by the turn of the century, had doubled to thirty thousand. Chicago’s Dearborn Street corridor, as it was now called, was convenient for those employed as servants in the mansions of the wealthy along Grand Boulevard to the east as well as for the Pullman porters who worked in the rail yards just northwest, and for those employed in Little Cheyenne, the black section of the Levee vice district, directly north. The corridor was by no means an exclusively black neighborhood, perhaps even one-half white on many blocks. Still, its first black-owned businesses—barbershops, tailors, and restaurants—were thriving.43 Abbott’s”
― Ethan Michaeli, The Defender: How the Legendary Black Newspaper Changed America

“Another African American leader whom Abbott met at the Chicago fair was Ida B. Wells, a fearless, confrontational investigator and journalist who, though just a few years older than Abbott, had already established herself as a leading spokesperson against lynching and segregation.”
― Ethan Michaeli, The Defender: How the Legendary Black Newspaper Changed America

“There is no Negro problem. The problem is whether the American people have honesty enough, loyalty enough, honor enough, patriotism enough to live up to their own Constitution.5”
― Ethan Michaeli, The Defender: How the Legendary Black Newspaper Changed America

“In the ’70s, The Defender lost circulation and influence, pinched on one side by a black power movement that saw the newspaper as too accommodating to the white establishment, and on the other by the large daily newspapers and television stations suddenly embracing integration, which to them meant siphoning off black journalists as well as black readers.”
― Ethan Michaeli, The Defender: How the Legendary Black Newspaper Changed America

“The Defender recorded our expansion of democracy—the degree to which African Americans were locked out of the process. The Defender recorded the injustice and then became part of the process of opening up opportunity and making people more aware of the civil rights issues that were at stake. Both in the South and in the North.”
― Ethan Michaeli, The Defender: How the Legendary Black Newspaper Changed America

“The first issue of The Chicago Defender appeared on May 5, 1905.”
― Ethan Michaeli, The Defender: How the Legendary Black Newspaper Changed America

“Marshall and others introduced Abbott to a city where African Americans enjoyed relative freedom in the public way. Blacks rode shoulder to shoulder with whites on streetcars; nor did they have to worry about stepping off sidewalks to let whites pass, or otherwise showing deference to whites at the risk of assault or murder. In Chicago, the police stopped lynchings rather than abetting them as was often the case in the South.”
― Ethan Michaeli, The Defender: How the Legendary Black Newspaper Changed America