📜 From Handbill to Powerhouse: How the Chicago Defender Shaped the Great Migration and Redefined Black Journalism

Founded in 1905 by Robert Sengstacke Abbott, the Chicago Defender became a national force against racial injustice — and a driving engine behind one of the largest internal migrations in U.S. history.

In the spring of 1905, in a cramped Chicago boardinghouse, Robert Sengstacke Abbott printed 300 copies of a modest four-page paper. He sold subscriptions himself, knocking on doors across the city. What began as a weekly handbill would become one of the most influential newspapers in American history: the Chicago Defender.

More than a publication, the Defender was a movement.

From its first issue, Abbott positioned the paper as a blunt instrument against racial injustice. Beneath its masthead ran an uncompromising declaration: “American Race Justice Must Be Destroyed.” At a time when mainstream newspapers often ignored or minimized violence against Black Americans, the Defender reported boldly on lynchings, sexual violence, economic exploitation, and voter suppression.

By 1915, the once-small weekly had grown to 16,000 in circulation. But its real impact extended far beyond Chicago.

A Catalyst for the Great Migration

Historians widely credit the Defender as a major catalyst behind the Great Migration, the historic movement of more than half a million African Americans from the rural South to Northern cities between 1915 and 1920.

Abbott understood the power of information. He used Black Pullman porters and entertainers to carry the paper across the Mason-Dixon Line, often smuggling bundles into Southern communities where racial terror and segregation defined daily life.

Trump and Musk Amplify Long-Ago Debunked Mail-In Vote Fraud Claim

A social media post cited by Elon Musk to bolster his argument that mail-in voting should be curtailed, and which was subsequently amplified by President Donald Trump, makes the false and long-ago debunked claim that in the 2020 election, “Pennsylvania sent out 1,823,148 mail-in ballots but received back around 2.5 MILLION mail-in ballots.”

As the Pennsylvania Department of State’s final report on the 2020 election shows, there were 2,673,272 mail-in ballot applications approved for the 2020 general election, so that’s how many were sent out. And of those, 2,273,490 votes were cast. (See charts 6.2 and 6.3 in the report.) Another 435,932 absentee ballots were also approved, and 374,659 of them were cast.

“This claim is based on mixing up statistics from the primary and the general election,” Charles Stewart III, director of the MIT Election Data and Science Lab, explained to us via email.

As online Pennsylvania records show, there were roughly 1.8 million absentee and mail-in ballots approved for the primary election in 2020, nearly 1.5 million of which were cast. In other words, the post mixes up the number of mail-in ballots (including absentee ballots) sent for the 2020 primary election and then cites the approximate number of mail-in ballots cast in the 2020 general election.

“These are long-ago debunked claims that will not disappear despite the availability of official data,” Stewart said.

Trump Oversells Recent U.S. Economic Growth

In the second and third quarters of 2025, the U.S. economy grew at its fastest pace in two years. Those growth rates were not “numbers unheard of,” or figures the U.S. “never had” before, as President Donald Trump has claimed.

In addition, economic experts told us that federal data do not support Trump’s claim that there was economic “stagflation” during the Biden administration and “the complete opposite” during Trump’s first year back in office. Inflation was high during much of Joe Biden’s presidency, but economic growth was not stagnant, another key indicator of stagflation, the experts said. 

They also said that Trump’s tariff policies likely hindered economic growth, rather than helped spur it, as the president has suggested. 

Trump made those claims in recent speeches and remarks, as well as in a late January opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal.