Trotter, William Monroe

Impact on the world

The first Black student to graduate Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard, Trotter used the Guardian, founded with George Forbes in the former offices of William Lloyd Garrison’s abolitionist Liberator, to relentlessly attack Booker T. Washington’s strategy of racial accommodation, most dramatically by heckling Washington during a 1903 Boston speech in an incident dubbed the “Boston Riot” that landed Trotter in jail for thirty days and cemented his national reputation as Washington’s foremost critic. He helped organize the Niagara Movement with W.E.B. Du Bois in 1905, a precursor to the NAACP from which he later broke over questions of white leadership, led a highly publicized and contentious 1914 Oval Office confrontation with President Woodrow Wilson over the segregation of federal offices, and, denied a passport, worked his way to the 1919 Paris Peace Conference as a ship’s cook to press for racial equality on the world stage. He spent his fortune keeping the financially struggling Guardian afloat and died on his 62nd birthday, April 7, 1934, after a fall from his Boston apartment building that his biographers believe may have been a suicide brought on by poverty and declining influence.

Life & background

Born April 7, 1872, in Chillicothe, Ohio, to a formerly enslaved Union Army officer father and a free-born mother, Trotter was raised in the Hyde Park section of Boston, graduated valedictorian of Hyde Park High School, and earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Harvard, becoming the university’s first Black Phi Beta Kappa inductee. He worked briefly in real estate and mortgage lending before founding the Boston Guardian in 1901 with George Forbes, married activist Geraldine “Deenie” Pindell in 1899 (she died in 1918), and led protest campaigns against segregation and the film The Birth of a Nation for more than three decades until his death on April 7, 1934.

Sources

1. Encyclopædia Britannica; Harvard Magazine; Boston.gov