This week, the Chicago Defender, one of the most renowned black newspapers in America, will cease to produce a print edition. Though it will continue to publish online, the demise of the Defender as a physical object, a hundred and fourteen years after its founding, marks another sad milestone in the decline of print newspapers. The Defender’s reputation arose not only through the quality of its writing—Langston Hughes and Ida B. Wells were contributors—but also thanks to the political stances it took. The paper didn’t merely editorialize against segregation and for equal rights for black Americans; it also offered a vision of black life in Chicago that was said to have encouraged the Great Migration northward of many Southern blacks. (The paper’s founder, Robert S. Abbott, had himself relocated from Georgia.) It also campaigned for desegregation of the military and covered business and community relations in the city’s numerous black neighborhoods.

To talk about the paper’s history, I recently spoke by phone with Glenn Reedus, a former executive editor and managing editor at the Defender who has worked in local journalism for many years. (He told me that he was “an itinerant newspaper guy loving the journey from typewriters to terabytes.”) During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed the paper’s iconic status in Chicago, its crucial role in the Great Migration, and the future of the black press.

What was the importance of the paper to African-Americans in Chicago and to the city of Chicago generally?

First of all, it goes way beyond Chicago. You have heard of the Great Migration of African-Americans moving from the South to the North, particularly Chicago. And the way they got news about Chicago was that Mr. Abbott, who was the founder, had Pullman porters take the papers on their route to the South and drop them off down there. That is when people started reading about Chicago and opportunities for black people, and that’s when they started coming. And, once they were here, because they were familiar with the Defender, it was almost like the Bible. I still find it funny and somewhat incredible that Mr. Abbott wrote a regular column telling people who had just migrated how to behave in Chicago: no public drunkenness, keep a quiet demeanor, places that it wasn’t safe to go, that sort of stuff.

Was the idea with the Pullman porters to consciously offer a vision of Chicago that would get people to move from the South, or was it just to give people news?

There was a conscious intent to get people to move to Chicago. And it made sense to use Pullman porters, because they had pretty much free access, although they had to hide the papers somewhere on the train after they picked them up in Chicago until they got to their destinations in Mississippi and along the way.

During this time, when the Defender was trying to consciously advertise Chicago, what was the vision of the city that was offered? Was it more rosy than reality?

A lot of generalities, like “if you come here, you can get a job.” Well, a lot of people came and had only farmed, so there weren’t a lot of jobs for them. And housing was very segregated—still is. And a lot of it was substandard housing, but better than what they left in the South.

In the first decades of the paper’s existence, what was its tone and style? What kind of things did it cover?

It was pro-black in a way that nobody else was. Mr. Abbott went so far as to make “Negro” uppercase and make “white” lowercase in news stories. And if you pick up most papers that are part of the National Newspaper Publishers Association—the black press—you will see that continues. “Black” is still uppercase.

Did the paper have a certain approach to culture or sports or—

There was very, very little sports back then. There was some entertainment, but it was primarily news. The paper took on a very serious tone covering the news.

It seems like the paper’s role during the Second World War was interesting, and that the issue of desegregating the military was important. Can you talk about that?

It was a huge issue, and Mr. Abbott was getting older, and his nephew John Sengstacke, who was, I guess you could say, more worldly, started running the paper, and he was able to reach out to writers around the country and get those kinds of stories.

I read that the government was upset with the paper because they thought the desegregation effort would interfere with recruiting.

That’s it. I don’t know if you read that Sengstacke met with Presidents to talk about this. For a black guy, that was very unusual for that early on. But Sengstacke was doing it in the late nineteen-forties, early nineteen-fifties.

Why did political leaders see it as so important to talk to who was publishing the paper?

They needed the black vote—or what little of it they could get. And I think some were genuinely interested in seeing equal rights, or some form of it.

John F. Kennedy’s win in Chicago, in 1960, is a disputed subject. What role did the paper play there?

It was instrumental in getting people to vote for Kennedy. Back then, you had Mayor Richard J. Daley, who was one of the most powerful Democrats in the country. Most Chicago residents were Democrats at the time, and he put the word out that people should vote for Kennedy.

What did people like about Kennedy?

No. 1, he wasn’t a Republican. No. 2, he spoke about all people. He was opposed to segregation and made that very clear during his campaigns, and Daley wanted him. Daley wanted a Democrat.

What was the paper’s relationship with the Daley family in the postwar era?

Generally, it was good. The mayor never came out against Mr. Abbott or Mr. Sengstacke or the paper. I think they were feeling their way with one another.

My understanding is that it is very contested how people look back on the family’s role in the city.

Daley opposed public housing. It was supposed to go throughout the city and he said no, and that’s when the city got its first high-rise projects, in the early nineteen-fifties. And that was Daley’s doing—to concentrate black people in one area. And, during the 1968 riots here, he issued a shoot-to-kill of looters that really incensed people. [The shoot-to-kill order was officially for arsonists; Daley said that looters should merely be maimed.]

His son Richard M. Daley was a lot smoother than his dad, and he would engage black people in some key areas, whereas his father wouldn’t, which mitigated the problems with the community: by his last election, in 2007, he won every black ward, and there are fifty wards. The strange thing is that, between elections, you found black people with absolutely nothing good to say about him. But then, come election time, they would vote for him.

How do you understand that?