The Chicago Defender converted racial terrorism into migration propaganda

Evidence

Abbott put out a “national edition” of his weekly, aimed at southern blacks. It carried in red ink such headlines as: 100 NEGROES MURDERED WEEKLY IN UNITED STATES BY WHITE AMERICANS; LYNCHING—A NATIONAL DISGRACE; and WHITE GENTLEMAN RAPES COLORED GIRL. Accompanying a lynching story was a picture of the lynch victim’s severed head, with the caption: NOT BELGIUM—AMERICA. Poems entitled Land of Hope and Bound for the Promised Land urged blacks to go North, and editorials boosted Chicago as the best place for them to go. Want ads offered jobs at attractive wages in and around Chicago. In news items, anecdotes, cartoons, and photos, the Defender crystallized the underlying economic and social causes of black suffering into immediate motives for flight. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 999

Categorization

• SEED: The phrase ‘Not Belgium — America’ contrasts wartime European atrocity propaganda against homegrown lynching, a sharp angle on media framing of racial violence.