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.