The Remarkable Robert Abbott
SMALLWOOD, WILLIAM
The Remarkable Robert Abbott The Lonely Warrior. By Roi Ottley. Regnery. 366 pp. $4.75. Reviewed by William Smallwood Poet and journalist; contributor, Los Angeles "Times,'' California...
...That is understandable...
...The first Abbott "extra" in 1915 carried the death announcement of Booker T. Washington...
...Ottley's treatment of his first biographical subject evinces hope he will in the future do an equally exhaustive study of the late Mary McLeod Bethune, a close friend of Robert S. Abbott...
...There are passages which denote reasonable awe on the part of the impressed biographer...
...circulation nearly 300,000), was a mixture of fire-breathing Olympiad, materialist and irascible penny-pinching millionaire...
...On being divorced by his second wife, he tearfully paid $50,000 to her and another $5,000 in legal fees and, true to the 15c-and-worth-it motto of his paper, ran every word of the sensational story on the front page...
...the Houston, Texas riot and unfair court martials ??”many such incidents are included...
...His finished product, concise and not at all burdensome, is believable...
...The publisher's joyful regard of Communism in the early Thirties is brushed over lightly by his biographer...
...you do learn, however, that Abbott was decorated by France, played bridge terribly and that one of his three German cousins by marriage had a son who was a Nazi party member...
...It emerges an absorbing reproduction of the life of a man highly controversial in his day...
...Ottley sometimes has his tongue in cheek...
...Especially delightful is a brief mention of Jack Johnson and Abbott...
...contributor, Los Angeles "Times,'' California "Eagle'' Roi Ottley, a writer not as a rule too easily carried away with any delusive enchantment of subject matter between research notebook and finished manuscript, has painstakingly separated the chaff (there must have been fields of it) from the wheat...
...The wholesale migration of Southern Negroes to Chicago after World War I (and the race riot holocaust, later) ; the Marcus Garvey fiasco...
...There are instances, too, which cause the reader to faintly suspect that Mr...
...Wisely, he makes no attempt to inject his own evaluation of this stubborn, not always fearless builder of a dynasty who was a phenomenon in that day and time of racial and economic unrest...
...Robert S. Abbott, founder and editor-publisher of the Chicago Defender Negro newspaper chain (present count: six weeklies...
Vol. 38 • June 1955 • No. 25
