Arthur family, pictured in Chicago Defender clipping, 1920

Archive: Vivian G. Harsh Research Collection, Woodson Regional Library

(Photo by Maggie Sivit | Vivian G. Harsh Research Collection, Woodson Regional Library)

The Vivian G. Harsh Research Collection, the largest African-American history and literature collection in the Midwest, is home to the Abbott-Sengstacke Family Papers, which includes the archives of the Chicago Defender. Over a decade ago, that collection helped solve a mystery behind a photo that had long been associated with the Great Migration. This particular photo, which depicts an African-American family standing at a Chicago train station with suitcases, frequently appears on book jackets and in documentaries about the black Exodus from the South in the early 20th century, says Beverly Cook, senior archivist at the Collection. “It’s an iconic image,” she explains. “But for the longest time, we knew they were part of the Migration story, but we didn’t know who they were.”

Vernon Jarrett, a former columnist for the Defender, was curious — so he started coming to the library to look through the paper’s archives, says Cook, explaining that Jarrett suspected the photo might have appeared in the Defender. After more than a year of searching through back issues of the newspaper, Jarrett found the original article that had accompanied the photo. The mystery was solved. The article described how the Arthur family pictured in the photo was fleeing Paris, Texas, where their two eldest sons had been lynched after a dispute with a white farmer over money and their daughters had been raped trying to defend them. “Somehow, the story spread,” says Cook, “long before the internet,” and the Defender helped raise funds to bring the family to Chicago and arranged to pick them up from the 12th Street train station. “The clothes, empty suitcases, were all staged [by the photographer],” says Cook. So while the image seems to suggest a certain story — “the typical migration story,” says Cook, “this family all set for their new life” — in reality, “they were shell-shocked. They had just gone through this horrible trauma.”

Started by Robert Sengstacke Abbott in 1905, the Chicago Defender was the nation’s foremost African-American newspaper for much of the 20th century. According to Cook, the Defender openly criticized the injustices of the Jim Crow South, and offered a “new vision, a new hope” for African-Americans in northern cities like Chicago. “Robert Abbott is the main reason a lot of people say that half a million blacks migrated from the South to the North,” says Cook. Consequently, the Defender was made illegal in many southern states. “If you got caught reading the paper or distributing it, you could be thrown in jail, or fined — or worse,” she says. To get around that, Abbott developed a loose relationship with the Pullman porters, who threw stacks of the paper out the train cars as they traveled south.

Among other things, Cook says the Arthur family photo is a good example of the importance of historical research and not taking things at face value. It’s also an example of the kind of activism the Defender was committed to, in addition to reporting the news. “It shows them being participatory in the news,” says Cook. “I don’t see that a lot today. They went beyond just telling the story. They went down there and brought these people north. They found them a place to stay. … It was a kind of courage booster. [It told people] you could count on the Defender.”