By Michael VanHouten, Associate Director
The Library now has full-text online access to the Chicago Defender, a leading and influential national African-American newspaper. Coverage is from 1905 to 1975. The Chicago Defender was ‚a leading African-American newspaper, with more than two-thirds of its readership outside Chicago. It was a proponent of the ‘Great Migration,’ the move of over 1.5 million African-Americans from the segregated South to the industrial North, 1915-1925.‛
The Defender allows researchers to study many significant events in American history that received only cursory attention from other newspapers. It covered the Red Summer Riots of 1919, editorialized for anti-lynching legislation, and published Walter White, Langston Hughes, and Gwendolyn Brooks. A link can be found on the Library’s Online Database page.