Rescue for once powerful voice

by Suzy Parker

      The long-troubled Chicago Defender, the city's 94-year-old black daily newspaper, craves stability. It just may now have it.
      Detroit businessman Don Barren has announced an agreement in principle to bail out Sengstacke Enterprises Inc., which publishes the Defender and
three other black newspapers. The deal would give the papers, especially the struggling Defender, an opportunity ot regain their franchises.
     The Sengstacke family also owns the Michigan Chronicle, the Pittsburgh Courier and the Memphis Tri-State Defender, making it the largest privately held African-American newspaper publisher in the U.S.
      Terms of the deal were not released, but the Sengstacke family will continue to be involved in the operation of the four newspapers and will retain continuity of ownership in Sengstacke Enterprises.
      "We have remained excited about this opportunity and will continue to work very closely with the Sengstacke family and its employees to rapidly close this transaction,"  said CEO Don Barden in a statement issued to the press . "We understand the importance to family members to both retain the legacy created and nurtured by the late John H. Sengstacke and to strengthen and expand the papers."
        Black Enterprise Magazine recently recognized Barden Companies, which is privately held, as the 13th largest African-American service/industrial company in the U.S. The company operates a casino in Indiana, five Illinois radio stations and other U.S. businesses, as well as a manufacturing and automotive plant in Namibia.
        The Defender has long been an important voice in Chicago’s black community, but that voice has faded in recent years. At its peak in the 1930s, The Defender had a readership of 300,000 and its distribution extended well into the South, luring blacks from cotton fields and other rural jobs to journey north to find work in northern factories.  Poet Langston Hughes and writer W.E.B. DuBois worked for the Defender long before their talents were noticed by the white press. Circulation now stands around 20,000.
       Through the years, the Defender has come under attack for poor management and a certain arrogance toward the black community and other black media. One former managing editor reportedly told a group of public relations executives that The Chicago Defender did not want to be considered a black newspaper.
       John Sengstacke, nephew of the paper's founder Robert Abbott, died in 1997 at 84. He was often cricticized for his inability to manage the business, and in 1975 Sengstacke Enterprises Inc. was put in the hands of a trustee.
      But while The Chicago Defender continued to decline, it never lost its core of supporters, who as much as anything prefer to remember it for what it was.  
       "The Defender is the only daily newspaper that tells our story," says the Rev. Al Sampson, who heads the Citizens Committee to Save the Chicago Defender.  "It has told our story throughout the black liberation movement, and we need it to keep telling that story."

- Suzi Parker is a writer in Little Rock, Arkansas.