Robert Sengstacke Abbott (December 24, 1870 – February 29, 1940) was an American lawyer, newspaper publisher and editor. Abbott founded The Chicago Defender in 1905, which grew to have the highest circulation of any black-owned newspaper in the country. An early adherent of the Baháʼí Faith in the United States, Abbott founded the Bud Billiken Parade and Picnic in August 1929. The parade, which has developed into a celebration for youth, education and African–American life in Chicago, Illinois, is the second largest parade in the United States. Biography Early life and education Abbot was born on December 24, 1870, in St. Simons, Georgia (although some sources state Savannah, Georgia) to freedman parents, who had been enslaved before the American Civil War. The Sea Islands were a place of the Gullah people, an African-descended ethnic group who maintained African-inherited cultural traits more strongly than many African Americans in other areas of the South. His father, Thomas Abbott died when Robert was a baby, and his widowed mother Flora Abbott (née Butler) met and married John Sengstacke, a mixed-race man of unusual background who had recently come to the US from Germany. Sengstacke's parents were Tama, a freed slave, and her husband Herman Sengstacke, a German sea captain who had a regular route from Hamburg to Savannah. Herman had met Tama at the Georgia port city in 1847, where, after becoming distressed at a slave sale, he bought and freed her. They married in Charleston, South Carolina, before returning to Georgia, where their interracial marriage was prohibited. Their son, John, was born the next year. Tama died soon after their second child, a daughter, was born, and Herman took the children back to Germany to be raised by family. John Sengstacke cared for Robert as if he were his own, and with Flora Abbot had seven additional children. Robert was given the middle name Sengstacke to mark his belonging in the family. John Sengstacke had become a Congregationalist missionary as an adult, a teacher, determined to improve the education of African American children, and a publisher, founding the Woodville Times, based in Woodville, Georgia, a town later annexed by Savannah, Georgia; he wrote, "There is but one church, and all who are born of God are members of it. God made a church, man made denominations. God gave us a Holy Bible, disputing men made different kinds of disciples.". Industrialization underway in