Born in 1870, Robert Abbott attended the Hampton Institute, the same school that Booker T. Washington attended. Abbott earned a law degree but could not practice law in the United States due to prejudice. Abbott's investment in The Chicago Defender caused him to become the first self-made African-American millionaire. The story of Abbott's rise to success is fascinating. He began his newspaper venture by himself, with only twenty-five cents to invest. He printed his paper on credit and delivered it by hand. Five years later, he hired J. Hockley Smiley, who encouraged the use of yellow journalism to grab readers' attention. Abbott, born in the South, knew how deplorable the conditions there were. Charles Simmons' description of the plight of the Southern black is highly accurate:

Hampton Students

Robert Abbott

An ongoing depression…and the loss of cotton crops to an infestation of boll weevil found many Negroes out of what little work they had had. Negroes also still could not vote and were denied work in many areas. Those Negroes who could find work could expect low wages. Lynching remained a traumatic ordeal for the entire Negro community. The attitude that killing humans was justified in order to keep them docile had become so common that some events took on a festive air, with plenty of people, some with children, in attendance and plenty of food and games.

Some blacks had already left for the North, and Abbott believed this was the best course of action for oppressed and poverty-stricken southern blacks. He used the Defender to encourage migration, posting job notices and writing about the better conditions available in the North. Besides filling his papers with the wonders of the North, Abbott used large, red headlines to decry each lynching as it occurred in the South to underscore the urgency of the need to move North. Abbott is credited with over 50,000 blacks' relocation from the South to Chicago. The story of the Defender's mission is vibrantly told in Charles Simmons' 1998 book The African American Press.

A Poor Cotton-Farming Family in South Carolina