Hi all,
Not sure if this has been mentioned on the site before, I did a search and didn't see anything obvious.
Anyway, I recently discovered the documentary 'Paper Trail: 100 years of the Chicago Defender' on the history of the Chicago Defender newspaper. I, like many of you (presumably), first heard about the Chicago Defender in reading about the history of Paramount Records and early blues recordings and the advertising they ran in the pages of the paper. Obviously though there is much much more to the history of this paper than just those ads. This documentary gives a good overview of that history.
There's also an excellent book which I'm a hundred pages into at the moment: 'The Defender: How the Legendary Black Newspaper Changed America' which I highly recommend. It's a well written deep dive into the paper's history and along with it the history of African Americans in the United States before and during the years in which the paper existed.
https://www.amazon.com/Defender-Legendary-Newspaper-Changed-America/dp/0547560699
