Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,334

This is the grave of William Monroe Trotter.

Born in 1872 near Chillcothe, Ohio, Trotter grew up in the post-Reconstruction North. Both his parents had been slaves; his mother’s grandfather was white, which was common due to the prevalence of sex slavery in the South. In any case, by the time Trotter was born, they were in Ohio and they moved to Boston shortly after his birth. His father became a major Black Democrat, of which there were not very many given that the Democratic Party was the party of white supremacy. It was good for patronage though, from which Trotter’s father benefited significantly, especially during the Cleveland administration.

So Trotter actually grew up quite wealthy, went to Harvard, and was the first African American to be accepted into Phi Beta Kappa there. Early on, Trotter did not really want to get involved in politics. He wanted to make money. But no white firm would hire him in anything but basic jobs. He opened an insurance agency and it went OK and he made some money. But he found his frustrations growing, both with the racial limitations on his own career in supposedly tolerant Boston and with the overall move toward acquiescence to white supremacy coming from Booker T. Washington. He found Washington’s Atlanta Compromise with the promise to give up on civil rights completely unacceptable. Moreover, he believed that Washington gave not only southern whites space to discriminate but also northern whites and that his own business transactions were under threat thanks to this ideology. So that is what turned Trotter into an activist.

It was in 1901 that Trotter became publicly active, giving speeches, starting civil rights publications, and joining organizations dedicated to Black equal rights. He and George Forbes started The Guardian that year, which became an important early twentieth century publication around Black rights. The paper wasn’t that successfully financially, largely because Trotter was such a strong prohibitionist and also hated smoking that he would not take ads from alcohol or tobacco companies. But it got enough attention that major white owned papers, including outside Boston, routinely attacked Trotter for his statements.

By 1903, Trotter was known as the most famous enemy of Washington and there were often actual fights between Washington supporters and Trotter supporters at gatherings, sometimes leading to police coming in and arresting people, including Trotter. But Washington supporters controlled the limited Black political organizations in the country at this time and they were doing nothing to stop the expansion of Jim Crow into Boston. Washington was also a real jerk. For a long time, people argued that Washington didn’t really believe in what he was saying but was saying it for white audiences. But no, we know now that he did believe in these things and that moreover, he was extremely jealous of any rival within Black America. So he would have his supporters target Trotter’s supporters in their jobs and try to get them fired. He would also hire informants to spy on Trotter and his allies and in fact, got Trotter’s printer for his paper to drop the activist.

Well, Trotter certainly wasn’t going to stand up to this. He and other northern activists disgusted by Washington decided a new movement was necessary. So in 1905, he and W.E.B. DuBois, another young Harvard educated activist, decided to start what became known as the Niagara Movement, which attempted to find a more radical, direct action path toward Black rights. Trotter was a difficult guy himself and his opposition to allowing women to join undermined it, as he and DuBois fought over this. The Niagara Movement failed by 1908, but in 1909, its remnants reformed as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which would become the organization Trotter had always wanted to see. But due to his fights with DuBois, Trotter was not welcome in the NAACP and tried to fight it in its early years. He started his own National Equal Rights League, but it never really challenged the NAACP in any meaningful way.

Trotter, like his father, tried to be a Democrat, but this was a pretty ridiculous stance to take by the 1910s. He actually met with Woodrow Wilson a couple of times when the southerner became president but it was a disaster. Wilson was completely in agreement with the white supremacist southerners at the base of his party and it’s not like other key advisors or officials from the North such as William Jennings Bryan disagreed with white supremacy either. Trotter and Wilson basically ended up yelling at each other during a 1914 meeting. This got Trotter pilloried in the racist media as the anti-Washington, the Bad Negro. He continued to try and fight the rise of segregation in the government and then in the military during World War I. He went to the Paris Peace Conference to push for Black rights, trying to embarrass Wilson. He had to get a job as a cook on a steamship to pay for it. Not only was he unable to meet with anyone, but he got there after DuBois had held his Pan-African Congress.

By the time Trotter returned to the U.S. later in 1919, the enormous summer of racism and white mobs was overtaking America, with some of the worst race riots in American history. Trotter criticized white racism with such stridency that members of Congress, including future Secretary of State James Byrnes, called for the suppression of the entire Black press. Trotter was known for doing whatever it took to stand up to racism. He was arrested in the protests against the showing of The Birth of a Nation in Boston in 1915, when he and his supporters charged into a theater that had refused to sell them tickets for it. By the early 20s, he had a pretty good alliance with Boston Catholics over fighting the KKK, which gave him some additional allies.

But things were rough. He was not a wealthy man and then his wife died in the 1918 flu epidemic, known as the “Spanish Flu” but in fact came out of a disgusting military base in Kansas and spread around the world. Geraldine Pindell Trotter was an important activist of her own, mostly working on her husband’s causes. He had lost most of his money and the 20s were rough for him. He had his respectability though, as well as his reputation and that was maybe enough. He spent quite a bit of that decade fighting for anti-lynching bills in Congress, which could never pass because of the filibuster. Later, he did a lot of work publicizing the Scottsboro Boys case, but by the early 30s, his style of activism was out of fashion. He was old and a new generation was rising. There wasn’t much common ground between Trotter and the Communist Party, which led so much of the activism to free those innocent young men.

In 1934, Trotter died, probably from suicide, in a fall from his home in Boston. He had known periods of depression, but we can’t know precisely. He had turned 62 that day.

William Monroe Trotter is buried in Fairview Cemetery, Boston, Massachusetts.

If you would like this series to visit other civil rights leaders involved in the Niagara Movement, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Archibald Grimké is in Hyattsville, Maryland and Ida B. Wells is in Chicago. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.