Black Radical: The Life and Times of William Monroe Trotter

by Kerri K. Greenidge

Overview

Winner • Mark Lynton History Prize
Winner • Peter J. Gomes Memorial Book Prize (Massachusetts Historical Society)
Shortlisted • Cundill History Prize
New York Times • Times Critics Top Books of the Year
Finalist • Massachusetts Book Awards

This long-overdue biography reestablishes William Monroe Trotter’s essential place next to Douglass, Du Bois, and King in the pantheon of American civil rights heroes.

 

William Monroe Trotter (1872– 1934), though still virtually unknown to the wider public, was an unlikely American hero. With the stylistic verve of a newspaperman and the unwavering fearlessness of an emancipator, he galvanized black working- class citizens to wield their political power despite the violent racism of post- Reconstruction America. For more than thirty years, the Harvard-educated Trotter edited and published the Guardian, a weekly Boston newspaper that was read across the nation. Defining himself against the gradualist politics of Booker T. Washington and the elitism of W. E. B. Du Bois, Trotter advocated for a radical vision of black liberation that prefigured leaders such as Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr. Synthesizing years of archival research, historian Kerri Greenidge renders the drama of turn- of- the- century America and reclaims Trotter as a seminal figure, whose prophetic, yet ultimately tragic, life offers a link between the vision of Frederick Douglass and black radicalism in the modern era.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781631495342
Publisher:	Liveright Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	11/19/2019
Pages:	432
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.60(d)

About the Author

Kerri K. Greenidge is Mellon Associate Professor at Tufts University. Her previous book, Black Radical: The Life and Times of William Monroe Trotter, won the 2020 Mark Lynton History Prize, among other awards. She lives in Westborough, Massachusetts.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Looking Out from the Dark Tower ix

Chapter 1 Abolition's Legacy: Radical Racial Uplift and Political Independence 1

Chapter 2 Becoming the Guardian: The Perils of Conservative Racial Uplift 30

Chapter 3 The Greatest Race Paper in the Nation 63

Chapter 4 Of Riots, Suffrage Leagues, and the Niagara Movement 99

Chapter 5 Negrowump Revival 133

Chapter 6 The New Negro Legacy of the Trotter-Wilson Conflict 165

Chapter 7 From The Birth of a Nation to the National Race Congress 201

Chapter 8 Liberty's Congress 234

Chapter 9 The Stormy Petrel of the Times 273

Chapter 10 Old Mon 309

Acknowledgments 353

Notes 357

Index 395

Editorial Reviews

William Monroe Trotter…shows up in the biographies of his contemporaries as a gadfly: radical, outspoken and indefatigable…That man comes through in Black Radical, Kerri K. Greenidge's spirited biography, an ardent and mostly approving account of Trotter's life that nevertheless conveys the more vexing elements of his personality.…Black Radical opens up a rich seam of inquiry that persists to this day, about the tug-of-war between reformers and radicals, and whether victories that seem purely symbolic at first can ripple out into real-world effects later on.

The New York Times - Jennifer Szalai

★ 09/23/2019

Tufts University professor Greenidge debuts with a vital, deeply researched biography of William Monroe Trotter, founder, in 1901, of the Guardian, the “weekly newspaper of colored Boston.” Born in 1873 to a former slave turned Union Army lieutenant and a descendant of the Hemings clan once owned by Thomas Jefferson, Trotter graduated from Harvard in 1895 and launched a real estate career that, according to Greenidge, made him “one of the wealthiest black men in New England.” He founded the Guardian as an “arsenal” in the war for civil rights, using the paper’s editorial section to attack the accommodationist policies of Booker T. Washington and expose racial injustices in the Jim Crow South. As an activist, Trotter cofounded the Niagara Movement, a forerunner of the NAACP, with W.E.B. Du Bois in 1905; confronted President Woodrow Wilson over his segregationist policies during a 1914 White House visit; and led protests against the pro–Klu Klux Klan film The Birth of a Nation. But Trotter’s legal entanglements and poor business management skills, Greenidge writes, took a financial toll, and in April 1934 he jumped to his death from a rooftop. Greenidge writes with urgency and clarity while synthesizing a wealth of archival material. Her eye-opening account elegantly traces Trotter’s rise and fall and uncovers early 20th-century Boston as “the center of radical African American politics.” (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

"William Monroe Trotter was not only present at the creation of the modern civil rights movement, Kerri Greenidge's welcome biography establishes that by his visionary militancy and selfless financial support Trotter merits reconsideration as progenitor of the movement. A major addition to the literature."

David Levering Lewis

"Kerri Greenidge has created the rare book where the actual writing is as exquisite as the stunning research. Black Radical offers a lush layered story and a blueprint for liberation."

Kiese Laymon

"In this engagingly written biography, historian Kerri Greenidge has penned a volume that provides a penetrating view of William Monroe Trotter’s radical thought and remarkable life. Black Radical incisively explores Trotter’s thirty years of editing and publishing the Guardian and brilliantly traces his influence on the emergence of “radical black consciousness at the turn of the twentieth century.” Moreover, this volume provides a detailed and compelling portrait of African American life in Boston; accessible to all readers, Greenidge’s new book is a valuable addition to the literature."

Henry Louis Gates

2019-08-26
A prominent newsman helped shape decades of civil rights activism.

Greenidge (Consortium of Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora/Tufts Univ.) makes her literary debut with an impressively researched biography of African American newspaperman and activist William Monroe Trotter (1872-1934), whose uncompromising views made him an influential—and controversial—figure. Born in Boston, raised among educated blacks dubbed "negrowumps," the precocious Trotter "was reading and writing entire Bible passages by four" and later participated, at his parents' dinner parties, in "passionate, often raucous debate over racial representation, political radicalism, and the continued deterioration of black civil rights." He enjoyed a comfortable middle-class childhood, taking piano lessons, playing tennis, and attending desegregated schools. After graduating at the top of his high school class, he went on to Harvard, where he was both popular and respected, a leader among his classmates. "Confident in the principles under which he'd been raised," Greenidge writes, "Monroe had no reason to believe that he and his colored fellows could not ‘plan a new world' in which all could contend for racial equality." That vision was undermined, as he saw it, by Booker T. Washington's insistence on "conservative racial uplift." Black citizens, Trotter believed, were being "duped into their own enslavement" by Washington's refusal to support black dissent and radical efforts to claim civil rights. In 1901, to counter those ideas, Trotter started his own newspaper, the Boston Guardian, aimed at working-class blacks. Within a short time, it became "the greatest race paper" in America, opening its readers' eyes to radical black politics in Boston and, as the years went on, throughout the country. Greenidge presents Trotter's growing prominence as a spokesman and gadfly in the context of economic, political, and often violent social upheaval in the first decades of the 20th century. A "prickly" and "inflammatory" personality, Trotter nevertheless attracted loyal followers, buoyed by his "populist demand for racial pride and political respect." He was, writes the author, "an icon of New Negro idealism, an unapologetic ‘race man' ready and willing to present his blackness before the world."

An absorbing biography that offers a fresh perspective on African American history.

Kirkus Reviews

"This engaging account of the life of William Monroe Trotter reclaims the vital work of an unsung activist and the complex reality of the long civil rights movement. Black Radical reminds us that the historic fight against racial violence and injustice was as Northern as it was Southern, as renegade as it was reformist. An important book and a rich chronicle of the past with urgent lessons for today."

Alondra Nelson

"Kerri K. Greenidge’s spirited biography [is] an ardent and mostly approving account of Trotter’s life that nevertheless conveys the more vexing elements of his personality…. Black Radical opens up a rich seam of inquiry that persists to this day, about the tug-of-war between reformers and radicals, and whether victories that seem purely symbolic at first can ripple out into real-world effects later on."

Jennifer Szalai

"[Trotter's] legacy presents a challenge to those who seek change today: is compromise a necessary evil of any social movement, or is it the original sin of collective action? These Greenidge argues that [his] protests, dismissed by many people at the time as publicity-seeking stunts, are Trotter’s real legacy.... One of the most satisfying accomplishments of Black Radical is the way that Greenidge situates Trotter’s biography in the broader story of liberal New England. Boston, Greenidge reminds her readers, incubated the politics of Malcolm X and of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., not to mention the writers Pauline Hopkins and Dorothy West."

Casey Cep