William Monroe Trotter

William Monroe Trotter was born on the seventh of April 1872 near Chillicothe, Ohio, the son of James Monroe Trotter — a lieutenant in the Massachusetts colored infantry during the Civil War and later Recorder of Deeds for the District of Columbia. Raised in comfort in Hyde Park, Massachusetts, young Trotter went on to Harvard, where he earned his degree magna cum laude and became the first man of African descent elected there to Phi Beta Kappa.

In 1901, with George W. Forbes, he founded the Boston Guardian, an independent Black newspaper he set in the very rooms that had once housed William Lloyd Garrison's Liberator. Through its columns Trotter became the most uncompromising opponent of Booker T. Washington's accommodationism, insisting that full civil and political rights were not to be bargained away for gradual favor.

In 1905 he joined W. E. B. Du Bois and others to found the Niagara Movement, the radical assembly whose declaration of principles demanded equal opportunity and the exercise of full citizenship. He later built the National Equal Rights League and, unbowed by station, confronted President Woodrow Wilson to his face in 1914 over the segregation of the federal service.

He died in Boston on the seventh of April 1934, his sixty-second birthday, having never once traded his principles for comfort. Let it be remembered that William Monroe Trotter would not be quieted, and that his voice cleared the road for those who came after.