William Monroe Trotter was an important civil rights activist in the early twentieth century and also the founder and editor of the Boston Guardian Newspaper (1901), an independent African American newspaper. He is known primarily for launching the first major challenge to the political dominance of Tuskegee Institute founder Booker T. Washington and as an inspiration for the formation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Trotter was also the founder of the National Negro Suffrage League (1905), the Niagara Movement (1905), and the Negro American Political League (1908).

William Trotter was born on April 7, 1872, in Chillicothe, Ohio into a well-to-do family. The family moved to Boston, Massachusetts in 1879 and he was raised in Hyde Park. He excelled in school, graduating from the otherwise all-white Hyde Park High School as valedictorian and president of his class. Trotter entered Harvard College in 1891 and earned his bachelor’s degree in international banking with honors (magna cum laude), becoming Harvard’s first black Phi Beta Kappa member. He received an M.A. degree in finance from Harvard a year later. Restricted from working as a banker because of his race, Trotter worked in a succession of low paying clerks’ jobs and eventually opened his own business selling insurance and brokering mortgages. Trotter's business was relatively successful, and he was able to purchase investment properties.

In 1899, he married equal rights activist Geraldine “Deenie” L. Pindell, who was a childhood friend to Trotter and from a militant race family. Deenie was college-educated and worked as a bookkeeper and stenographer. In 1901 she became the society editor and handled much of the bookkeeping for the Boston Guardian. Some of her other projects included anti-lynching activism and seeking pardons for inmates. The Trotters did not want children as they had dedicated their lives to the paper. Deenie died in the 1918 flu pandemic, leaving Trotter a widower at the age of 46.

Trotter stridently opposed the racially conciliatory policies advocated by Booker T. Washington and called for a renewed emphasis on liberal arts education in contrast to Washington’s promotion of industrial training. Trotter’s public challenges of Washington’s policies began in 1901 with his founding of the Boston Guardian and the Boston Literary and Historical Association, a forum designed to attract potential opponents of Washington including, most notably, W.E.B. DuBois. The Guardian became a forum for a more outspoken and forceful approach to gaining racial equality, and its contributors and editorials (which were generally written by Trotter) regularly attacked Washington. The importance of the paper is described in a quote from DuBois:

The Guardian was bitter, satirical, and personal; but it was earnest, and it published facts. It attracted wide attention among colored people; it circulated among them all over the country; it was quoted and discussed. I did not wholly agree with the Guardian, and indeed only a few Negroes did, but nearly all read it and were influenced by it.

—W. E. B. DuBois

In July 1905, twenty-nine opponents of Washington, including Trotter and W.E.B. DuBois, met in Niagara Falls, Canada to form the Niagara Movement, the first organization to challenge Washington’s power, and the first Black-oriented civil rights organization formed in the twentieth century. During the meeting, the group drew up a manifesto, demanding voting rights for African Americans, an end to racial segregation and discrimination, and better health care, housing, and schools for the nation’s black population.

In 1908, Trotter left the organization in opposition to women joining and the growing prominence of W.E. B. DuBois. One year later, Trotter rejoined several Niagara co-founders in helping to establish the NAACP, even though he refused to join the Association because he felt it was negatively affected by white leadership and financial support. His view was that having an organization that had white leadership and funding meant that it would also be controlled by white people, many of whom still held paternalistic and racist views of Black folks. As an alternative, he revived the National Equal Rights League.

Trotter’s outspoken activism also extended to his direct denouncements of President Theodore Roosevelt for discharging three companies of the all-Black 25th United States Infantry after the Brownsville Riot in Texas (1906), and publicly confronting President Woodrow Wilson in 1914 after the new president imposed racial segregation on federal employees for the first time. Trotter led Boston protests against the screening of the racist motion picture, The Birth of a Nation, in 1915.

Trotter advocated for a federal commitment to equal rights before Black soldiers participated in the United States’ World War I war effort. He was an observer at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference where he called for the end of colonialism in Africa. In the early 1920s Trotter opposed Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) and its Back to Africa Movement.

William Monroe Trotter passed away in his Boston home on April 7, 1934. He was 62.

Sources:

Ruffin II, H. (2007, January 23). William Monroe Trotter (1872-1934). BlackPast.org. https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/trotter-william-monroe-1872-1934/

The William Monroe Trotter Multicultural Center. “Timeline of William Monroe Trotter's Life.” University of Michigan. Accessed on 2022, January 29. https://trotter.umich.edu/article/timeline-william-monroe-trotters-life

Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Monroe_Trotter

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