In 2013, the paper was locally purchased from Real Times Media by the Tri-State Defender Board of Directors Sengstacke's Chicago Defender circulated widely across the Southern United States, but Sengstacke in the early 1950s identified Memphis as a particularly attractive market, where several African-American newspapers had failed to take root and a startup would face only one competitor, The Memphis World, which had begun in 1931 (and would continue publishing until 1961).
The 20-page inaugural edition included "The Tri-State Defender Ten Point Program", consisting of vows "to broadcast to the world the achievements of all the citizens it serves", "to join hands with all citizens regardless of creed or color who wish to develop better human relations and to advance the principals of American Democracy", and "to uphold those Christian principles which under gird our republic", among others.
[5] Editor L. Alex Wilson and his Tri-State Defender journalists led coverage of the 1955 murder of Emmett Till, an African-American teen from Illinois who was killed in Mississippi after allegedly flirting with a white woman.
Their stories and photographs dominated both their own paper and the Chicago Defender for weeks,[6] and the trial became a media sensation and landmark event in the Civil Rights Movement.
[7] The Tri-State Defender in its first 50 years was part of Sengstacke Enterprises Inc., a chain of prominent African-American publications, which in the 1990s included the flagship Chicago Daily Defender, the Michigan Chronicle and the New Pittsburgh Courier.