By Jennifer Cox

     A big chunk of black history is on the block, along with a once powerful and venerated newspaper.
     The financially ailing Chicago Defender is set to be auctioned at the end of the month, and three bidders have stepped forward with promises to restore the paper to at least some of its former renown.
     The auction comes in the wake of a failed $10 million debt-financed recapitalization plan by the  founding Sengstacke family.
     "We have a family institution that is 95 years old that has been operated by a single family," Kurt Cherry, president of PublicMediaWorks, one of the bidders, told the Chicago Tribune.
     "The newspaper landscape has been radically transformed during that time. And the results speak for themselves," Cherry said, in explaining the Defender's decline.
      That decline has been most dramatic in recent years.
      At its peak, and long before the civil rights movement that began in the Fifties, the Defender was a powerful voice for blacks, and not only in Chicago.
   In the 1930’s, the paper had a readership of nearly 300,000 and a distribution that extended into the Deep South.
      The fabled newspaper began as a weekly in 1905 on the kitchen table of  now-famous newspaperman Robert Sengstacke Abbott.  Its mission statement: "American race prejudice must be destroyed."
     The paper lived by that motto. The Defender became well known for rousing blacks in the early fights against segregation. The paper is also often credited for triggering the "Great Migration" of African-Americans out of the South in the years preceding World War I, when the Defender encouraged blacks to leave farm work and journey north to seek factory jobs.
    Significant African-American writers Langston Hughes and W.E.B. DuBois honed their craft working for the Defender, long before gaining mainstream recognition.
    Financial trouble for the Defender began in 1997, after the death of  chairman and publisher John Sengstacke, Abbott’s nephew. Over twenty years earlier, Sengstacke had placed the company in trust with instructions that it be sold after his death.
     But by then the paper had already suffered serious decline. Circulation had fallen markedly, in part because of poor management but also because of the dramatic changes in Chicago's black community. For many young blacks who had moved into the middle and professional classes, the Defender was seen as an anachronism that had failed to stay in touch with their community.
    The paper now struggles with a paid daily circulation of only 16,000 and a weekend circulation of 19,000, in a city with nearly 1.1 million African Americans.
    The other weekly papers owned by the Sengstacke family are the Tri-State Defender in Memphis, the Pittsburgh Courier, and Detroit’s Michigan Chronicle. Of all of Sengstacke Enterprises’ publications, including the Defender, only the Chronicle is said to be making money.   
    Two years ago, Cherry's PublicMediaWorks tried to buy Sengstacke Enterprises, offering $12 million when the company first went up for sale.  That offer was turned down.
   Last fall, Detroit businessman Don Barden announced that his company, Barden Companies, was coming to the ailing newspaper’s rescue. Details of the plan were not released, but it was that reported the Sengstacke family would retain 49 percent of the company.
    However, faced with an upcoming deadline to pay $3 million in estate taxes of John Sengstacke, due in mid February, the family opted to sell the company outright.
    Bidders in the upcoming auction are Barden, PublicMediaWorks, and a third black-owned media company, Houston-based Equal Access Media.

-Jennifer Cox is a staff writer for Media Life.