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.

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.

He returned home to Georgia for a period, then went back to Chicago, where he could see changes arriving with thousands of new migrants from the rural South as a part of the Great Migration.

He wanted to push for job opportunities and social justice, and was eager to persuade Black people to leave the segregated, Jim Crow South for Chicago.

Its success resulted in Abbott becoming one of the first self-made millionaires of African-American descent; his business expanded as African Americans moved to the cities and became an urbanized, northern population.

From 1890 to 1908 all the southern states had passed constitutions or laws that raised barriers to voter registration and effectively disenfranchised most Black people and many poor whites.

Legislatures imposed Jim Crow conditions, producing facilities for Black people that were "separate" but never "equal" (referring to the Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) case, in which the US Supreme Court ruled that segregated facilities, such as railroad cars providing "separate but equal" conditions, were constitutional).

The northern and midwestern industrial centers, where Black people could vote and send children to school, were recruiting workers based on expansion of manufacturing and infrastructure to supply the US's expanding population as well as the war in Europe, which started in 1914.

The Pennsylvania Railroad and others were expanding at a rapid rate across the North, needing workers for construction and later to serve the train passengers.

The Defender told stories of earlier migrants to the North, giving hope to disenfranchised and oppressed people in the South of other ways to live.

He wrote, "Miscegenation began as soon as the African slaves were introduced into the colonial population and continues unabated to this day.... What's more, the opposition to intermarriage has heightened the interest and solidified the feelings of those who resent the injunction of racial distinction in their private and personal affairs.

"[18] He believed that laws restricting personal choice in a mate violated the constitution and that the "decision of two intelligent people to mutual love and self-sacrifice should not be a matter of public concern.

During the Great Depression, Abbott featured Bud Billiken in the youth column of his newspaper, the Chicago Defender, as a symbol of pride, happiness, and hope for black residents.

[20] In 1912, Abbott met ʻAbdu'l-Bahá, head of the Baháʼí Faith, through covering a talk of his during his stay in Chicago during his journeys in the West.

[24] The commission conducted studies about the changes resulting from the Great Migration; in one period, 5,000 African Americans were arriving in the city every week.

[6] Though some of his stepfather Sengstacke's relatives in Germany became Nazis in the 1930s and later, Abbott continued correspondence and economic aid to those who had accepted him and his father's family.