For a Black arts institution in Bronzeville, the Chicago Defender was the vehicle that carried the work into the wider world. Founded in 1905 by Robert S. Abbott, the Defender became the most influential Black newspaper in America, taking a national editorial perspective on issues of central concern to African American readers and reaching a readership that stretched far beyond the city: two-thirds of its sales were beyond Chicago. It did more than cover the news; it helped catalyze the Great Migration that built the very South Side community the Sammy Dyer School of the Theatre grew out of, and it gave that community an important lens into Chicago life, culture, and politics. Its pages carried the recitals, revues, and rising talent of the neighborhood, the entertainment columns, the notices, the photographs that told Black Chicago its own artists were worth watching. For the Dyer School and its Dyerettes, that coverage was oxygen: it turned a dance recital into an event and a school into an institution. 

​

Shirley knew how to get the word out. She understood that the work only mattered if people came to see it, and that the Defender was how you made people come. She knew which editor to call, when a photograph would land, and how to frame a program so that it read as something not to be missed. That instinct for publicity as a form of care for the art is part of what let her carry the Sammy Dyer legacy across borders, from Bronzeville to The Bahamas.​