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To approach the research question, I pulled from historical knowledge about my hometown and place of undergraduate study. Beyond the present-day, Chicago has a lengthy history of divisions: racial, economic, and political. The Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Defender present this divide, which remains relevant to the entirety of the United States, as they were and are published nationwide. The notorious Chicago Tribune was fiscally conservative, focusing on the economy and politics. Within a decade of its creation, “editor and co-owner Joseph Medill … turned the paper into one of the leading voices of the new Republican Party” (Wilson). With one liberal editor between its creation and the 20th century, “[d]uring the 1930s and 1940s, McCormick [editor, Medill’s grandson] used the Tribune ... to attack the New Deal and promote isolationism and anti-Communism” (Wilson).
In contrast, the Chicago Defender is the first African American newspaper to reach an audience of over 100,000 readers (at an estimated half-million), of which two-thirds were outside of Chicago. Ironically, as reported by the Tribune in 2019, “transplanted Southerners kept reading the Defender because the paper … reported on matters of interest to Chicago’s black community that the Tribune and other Chicago papers generally didn’t cover” (Editorial Board). Thus, their scope aligned with my critical intention of intervening on the side of those with less power. With a distinct intention to report for marginalized peoples, it serves as evidence of marginalized peoples’ history. With their distinct interests, the Tribune and the Defender are coinciding but present contradictory narratives, hence my interest. For the analysis, the Defender was concluded to be the most effective and evidence-rich, despite not being the Tribune’s strongest competitor. The Defender’s foundation was socially progressive, which led to its confiscation by white extremist groups in the south, including the Ku Klux Klan. This serves as an example of both its influence and silencing. The distribution of the newspaper and its support of the Great Mitigation Movement led to “at least 110,000 [black people migrating] to Chicago ... between 1916-1918, nearly tripling the city's black population” (PBS). This places the migration before the decades of economic prosperity and the Great Depression.