Ethan Michaeli

“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