William Monroe Trotter, sometimes just Monroe Trotter (April 7, 1872 – April 7, 1934), was an American newspaper editor and real estate businessman based in Boston, Massachusetts. An activist for African-American civil rights, he was an early opponent of the accommodationist race policies of Booker T. Washington, and in 1901 founded the Boston Guardian, an independent African-American newspaper he used to express that opposition. Active in protest movements for civil rights throughout the 1900s and 1910s, he also revealed some of the differences within the African-American community. He contributed to the formation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
Trotter was born into a well-to-do family and raised in Hyde Park, Massachusetts. J. M. Trotter, a Recorder of Deeds, and Virginia Trotter were his parents. He earned his graduate and post-graduate degrees at Harvard University, and was the first man of color to earn a Phi Beta Kappa key there. Seeing an increase in segregation in northern facilities, he began to engage in a life of activism, to which he devoted his assets. He joined with W. E. B. Du Bois in founding the Niagara Movement in 1905, a forerunner of the NAACP. Trotter's style was often divisive, and he ended up leaving that organization for the National Equal Rights League. His protest activities were sometimes seen to be at cross purposes to those of the NAACP.
In 1914, he had a highly publicized meeting with President Woodrow Wilson, in which he protested Wilson's introduction of segregation into the federal workplace. In Boston, Trotter succeeded in shutting down productions of The Clansman in 1910, but he was unsuccessful in 1915 with screenings of the movie The Birth of a Nation, which also portrayed the Ku Klux Klan in favorable terms. He was not able to influence the peace talks at the end of World War I, and was in later years a marginalized voice of protest. In 1921, in an alliance with Roman Catholics, he got a revival screening of The Birth of a Nation banned. He died on his 62nd birthday after a possibly suicidal fall from his Boston home.
Early life and education William was the third child, and first to survive infancy, of James Monroe Trotter and Virginia (Isaacs) Trotter.Fox, p. 9. His father James was born into slavery in Mississippi; James' mother Letitia was enslaved, and his father was her white master Richard S. Trotter.Fox, p. 3. Letitia, her son and two daughters were freed by their master after his marriage and sent to Cincinnati, Ohio, which had a thriving free black community. After working as a teacher, James Trotter enlisted in the United States Colored Troops during the American Civil War,Fox, p. 4. and was the first man of color to be promoted to lieutenant in the 55th Regiment of the Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry (Colored).Fox, p. 5. Duganne, Erina, "Black Civil War Portraiture in Context", mirror of race.org, April 5, 2012. Retrieved 2015-11-29.
Virginia Isaacs, also of mixed race, was born free in 1842 in either Ohio or Virginia. Her mother Ann-Elizabeth Fossett was born into slavery at Monticello, where she was a daughter of Joseph Fossett and Edith Hern Fossett, and great granddaughter of Elizabeth Hemings. Virginia's father Tucker Isaacs was a free person of color. He purchased the freedom of Ann-Elizabeth Fossett, Virginia's mother. The family moved to Chillicothe in the free state of Ohio, where Virginia grew up in its thriving black community. There she met and married James Trotter.Fox, p. 8.
Shortly after the Civil War, the Trotters moved from Ohio to settle in Boston, Massachusetts. After their first two children died in infancy, they returned to the Isaacs farm of Virginia's parents, where their son William Monroe Trotter was born on April 7, 1872. When he was seven months old, the family moved back to Boston, where they settled in the South End, far from the predominantly African-American west side of Beacon Hill. The family later moved to suburban Hyde Park, a white neighborhood. The Trotters had two more children, both daughters.
Trotter's father broke through many racial obstacles placed before him, but was often frustrated in his attempts to gain equal treatment or fair consideration. While serving in the Union Army, he protested the inequality of pay between blacks and whites. In Boston he was the first man of color to be employed by the Post Office Department (now the U.S. Postal Service), a job he left after he was repeatedly passed over for promotion because of discriminatory Republican-led federal government policy.Fox, p. 10. Politically active, the elder Trotter was a leading African-American Democrat in New England. He supported Grover Cleveland for President, and was rewarded in 1886 when Cleveland appointed him Recorder of Deeds for the District of Columbia, the highest federal position filled by black men at the time.Fox, p. 12. Two other prominent men of color of that era, Frederick Douglass and Senator Blanche Kelso Bruce, also held the post.Finkelman, p. 216. The job was a lucrative one, and the Trotter family prospered.Fox, p. 13.
The young Trotter (who was usually called by his middle name "Monroe") grew up in this environment, and was introduced to Archibald Grimké, another politically active African American who also lived in Hyde Park.Fox, p. 14. He excelled in school, graduating from the otherwise all-white Hyde Park High School as valedictorian and president of his high school class.Harrison, p. 239. He went on to Harvard University, where he continued to distinguish himself academically. He was awarded merit scholarships after his father died, and was the first man of color to be awarded a Phi Beta Kappa key at Harvard. He earned a bachelor's degree magna cum laude in 1895 and a Masters in 1896, working a variety of odd jobs to help pay his tuition.Fox, pp. 15–19.
During his years at Harvard, he adopted a number of habits which he maintained for much of his life. He organized and led the Total Abstinence League, a temperance organization; he was a teetotaler and never drank alcohol.Fox, p. 17. He was active in the Baptist church, in which he had considered becoming a minister.Fox, p. 15.
Marriage and family Following his graduation, Trotter participated in the upper echelons of Negro society in Boston, a number of whose members had ancestors free before the Civil War.Fox, p. 21. He belonged to an exclusive literary society that met at the home of Cambridge educator Maria Baldwin. On June 27, 1899, Trotter married Geraldine Louise ("Deenie") Pindell (October 3, 1872 – October 8, 1918), who was from another activist family. He had known her since childhood.Fox, p. 22. She assisted him throughout his career until her death in the 1918 flu pandemic.Harrison, p. 240. The couple had no children.Fox, p. 212.
Early career Trotter's career began inauspiciously. His initial attempts to get jobs at established banking and real estate firms were unsuccessful, leading him through a succession of lower-paying clerking jobs.Fox, p. 24. He finally landed a job in a white-owned real estate firm in 1898, but decided the next year to open his own business selling insurance and brokering mortgages. He was not particularly active in agitating for civil rights in these years, although his strong opinions on racial equality were evident in an 1899 paper in which he called on African Americans to seek admission to institutions of higher learning. (It was a common practice of the time to direct African Americans away from higher education opportunities and into industrial training programs.) Trotter's business was relatively successful, and he was able to purchase investment properties.Fox, p. 25.
Trotter was increasingly troubled by what he saw as the accommodationist policies of Booker T. Washington, one of the leading African-American figures of the 1890s and founder of the Tuskegee Institute. Washington's policies were enshrined in the Atlanta Compromise, outlined in an 1895 speech he gave in Atlanta, Georgia. He said that Southern African Americans should not agitate for political rights (such as the right to vote and equal treatment under the law) as long as they were provided economic opportunities and basic rights of due process.Brown and Stentiford, pp. 55–56. Washington actively promoted the idea that African Americans, once they had proven themselves as productive members of society, would be granted full political rights. Trotter, Grimké, W. E. B. Du Bois, and other northern radicals disagreed with these ideas, arguing that it was necessary for African Americans to agitate for equal treatment and full constitutional rights, because doing so would bring other benefits.Fox, pp. 36–43. By the turn of the century, African Americans in the South had been effectively disfranchised by violence around elections, and restrictions in voting registration rules, and, finally, constitutional amendments or new constitutions in Southern states.
Although Boston was comparatively congenial when compared to other parts of the country, Trotter and others felt that Washington's stance was leading to an increase in more typically Southern racist attitudes in the city. "The conviction grew upon me", he wrote, that his business successes could be endangered "if race prejudice and persecution and public discrimination from mere color was to spread up from the South and result in a fixed caste of color".Fox, p. 27.
The Guardian
Trotter's racial activism blossomed in 1901. He helped found the Boston Literary and Historical Association, which became, according to biographer Stephen Fox, "a forum for militant race opinion".Fox, p. 28. He also joined the Massachusetts Racial Protective Association, another local group that promoted political goals of equality. Under the aegis of the latter group, Trotter in October 1901 gave his first major protest speech, attacking Booker T. Washington's accommodationist stance: "In Boston [Washington] said that the Negro should wait for the franchise until he had got property, education and character. Washington's attitude has ever been one of servility."Fox, p. 29.
With George W. Forbes, another Protective Association member, in 1901 Trotter co-founded the Guardian, a weekly newspaper. At first Forbes, an Amherst College graduate with some experience in publishing, was the driving operational force in its production, while Trotter funded the effort and served as its managing editor.Fox, pp. 29–30. The paper 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 paper's editorial stance brought a stream of criticism from more mainstream African-American publications: the New York Age, calling it "putrescent", wrote that "Editor Trotter ... makes himself smelt if not felt"; another wrote that the Guardian was "carrying its cases too fast and too far", and that Trotter suffered from a "mental malady".Fox, p. 31. The Guardian had limited circulation, but was highly influential as one of only 200 African-American publications in the country. It suffered financially due to Trotter's poor accounting and inattention due to his heavy schedule. Forbes, who principally worked as a librarian in the city library, left the business in 1904 because of Booker T. Washington's legal assaults on the newspaper and pressure by Washington supporters on his employers.Fox, pp. 30, 64–65. Trotter's wife, and later his sister, assisted in the paper's publication.Horne and Young, pp. 31–32.