William Monroe Trotter

William Monroe Trotter was born on the seventh of April 1872 at Springfield, Ohio, the son of James Monroe Trotter — a Civil War officer of the Massachusetts 55th Colored Infantry and later Recorder of Deeds for the District of Columbia — and Virginia Isaacs Trotter, the daughter of an enslaved woman and Thomas Jefferson's grandson. The family was the wealthiest African American household in Boston at the time of his birth and the Trotters owned substantial real estate in the Beacon Hill and South End neighborhoods. He was raised in Hyde Park, Massachusetts — the only Black child in a largely Irish neighborhood — and was educated at the integrated Hyde Park public schools.

He took the bachelor's at Harvard College in 1895 — magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, and the first African American to receive the Phi Beta Kappa key from Harvard — and the master's the following year. He worked from 1896 to 1901 in the Boston real-estate business, building a substantial personal fortune through his investments in the city's commercial properties.

He founded in November 1901 the weekly newspaper Boston Guardian with the Harvard-educated lawyer George Forbes. The Guardian operated for the following thirty-three years as the principal anti-Washington African American newspaper of the East Coast. Its editorial policy — radical, integrationist, equal-rights — was the principal published opposition to Booker T. Washington's (placed in this archive) accommodationist programme.

His decisive public action was the Boston Riot of the thirtieth of July 1903. Trotter and a group of supporters interrupted Booker T. Washington's address at the Columbus Avenue African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in Boston with a series of questions Washington refused to answer. The disturbance — and Trotter's two-week imprisonment for it — produced the breaking-point of the Washington-Du Bois controversy and produced the conditions under which Du Bois met with Trotter at Fort Erie in July 1905 to found the Niagara Movement.

He was a founding member of the Niagara Movement and refused after 1909 to join the NAACP on grounds that it included white founding members. He met with President Woodrow Wilson at the White House on the twelfth of November 1914 — the conference at which Wilson, asked by Trotter to repudiate the recent re-segregation of the federal civil service, dismissed Trotter from the Oval Office with the warning that the petition had been delivered in "a tone with a background of passion."

He died at his Boston home on the seventh of April 1934 — his sixty-second birthday — of injuries sustained in a fall from the roof of his Roxbury rooming house. The death was ruled accidental.

He is honored here as the editor of the Boston Guardian.