William Monroe Trotter would not take no for an answer — even if it meant disguising himself as a kitchen laborer and stowing away on a ship across the Atlantic in order to advocate for racial equity.
Trotter had been elected by the National Colored Congress for World Democracy to represent African Americans at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, one of 11 delegates asked to attend. President Woodrow Wilson's administration denied passports to all 11 delegates, and ten of them stayed behind — but Trotter would not be silenced. After a long journey by boat and train, Trotter spoke to the press about racial inequity in America and handed out lists of demands to conference leaders, including an end to racial segregation.
“He shaved off his distinguished mustache so that he might not be known. In other words, he used anonymity as a means by which to do the work, as opposed to prominence, which means to do the work and to be credited for the work,” said Rev. Cornell Brooks, the founder of the William Monroe Trotter Collaborative for Social Justice at Harvard University. “That’s a very powerful metaphor for his approach.”
To commemorate what would have been Trotter's 150th birthday, Brooks is holding a symposium today and Friday to honor his legacy. Brooks, a Harvard professor and former NAACP president, raises Trotter’s name seemingly everywhere he can: in sermons, college courses and the collaborative's activities. Trotter is a focal point — partly because of his impact, and partly, Brooks said, because not enough people know who Trotter was even though his protests became a model for generations of activists.
“He has been undersung,” Brooks said. “But if you ask me, the times now amplify his voice and sing his praises.”
The son of parents born into slavery, Trotter grew up in Hyde Park in the late 1800s and earned two degrees from Harvard. His activism blossomed in 1901 when he founded the Guardian, a weekly newspaper published in Boston with editorials that railed forcefully against racism and refused to accommodate segregationist perspectives.
“He was Black Twitter before Twitter,” Brooks said. “He adopted a somewhat confrontational posture when it came to injustice.”
Trotter's editorials clashed with the views of many prominent Black leaders, including Booker T. Washington, an accommodationist who believed that agitation and protest worked against the advancement of African Americans.
When Washington came to a Black church on the South End-Roxbury line to give a speech, Trotter planned to shout questions from the crowd, and was later arrested for allegedly inciting what became a riot.
With the help of W.E.B. DuBois and other civil rights leaders, Trotter in 1905 founded the Niagara Movement, a conference that paved the way for the NAACP. Washington and his supporters worked to discredit the Niagara Movement, seeing it as a threat to his prestige.
“Now, when Parkland students call out gun manufacturers, when Greta Thunberg calls out President [Joe] Biden and world leaders for not taking climate change serious, nobody considers that an inappropriate tactic,” said Brooks. “Calls for justice, mass protest demonstrations … he was doing that 100 years ago. Just because he wasn't popular didn't mean he wasn't prophetic and prescient.”
Toward the end of his life, many of Trotter's friends had become his enemies. After refusing to raise the price of his newspaper or cut costs, the Guardian had drained his personal finances. He was in poor physical health, depressed and heartbroken after the loss of his wife to the 1918 influenza epidemic.
He lost his house near Upham's Corner in Dorchester and moved into an apartment in Lower Roxbury. On the morning of his 62nd birthday in 1934, Trotter died after a fall from the roof of his apartment.
The protests, marches, boycotts and stand-ins Trotter organized became the model for future generations of activists. Several schools and academic institutions are named for him, including an elementary school in Dorchester, a research institute at UMass Boston and a multicultural center in Michigan.
To those familiar with the civil rights movement in Boston, he is known as one of the greats. But compared to many of his contemporaries who are celebrated in the retelling of history — Washington and DuBois, for example — Trotter is often left out of the conversation.
“When I learned about him and when I read things about him, I was always puzzled why he doesn’t get any recognition,” Janina Seibel said, sitting at a marble countertop in what is now a bright and renovated kitchen in Dorchester, the long-ago home of William Monroe Trotter and his wife, Geraldine Louise Pindell. “My only explanation was always that he was too extreme and uncomfortable for people. He refused to find a middle ground, but I think in the end, he was right.”
By the time that she moved with her husband, Werner, and their three children from Germany into the William Monroe Trotter House in 2010, the house had already been renovated multiple times. Aside from a historical landmark plaque placed on the fence outside in 1976 and a picture of Trotter that hangs in the foyer, the house is like any other on the residential block: a family home with children running up and down the stairs, toys in the backyard and paintings hung on the fridge.
“This is not a museum. There is really nothing original of him in sight, but nonetheless, it’s his house,” said Werner Seibel. “Once or twice a year, someone comes by, so we invite them in and ask if they’d like to see anything.”
In the past decade, the Seibels have become historians of Trotter, equipped with a folder of reading materials, records and history books left behind by the home’s last owner.
“We didn't know anything about him, and he wasn't the reason why we bought the house, but after we moved here and read about him, we named our second daughter Louise, his wife’s second name. Louise is not a German name, and all our [other] kids have German names,” Janina Seibel said. “It was in our heads. I think subconsciously, we honored him by naming our daughter after his wife.”
Since learning about Trotter’s legacy, the Seibels find his lack of prestige confounding.
“He was a classic collectivist, he was not taking any bulls**t from anyone,” Janina Seibel said. “He wanted to do it his way, and I think people thought he was a bit too extreme. That was kind of his downfall, and maybe that’s why he never got recognition — he was too uncomfortable for people.”
Trotter’s style of confrontation and direct action paved the way for generations of activists after him, Brooks says, but in the early 20th century, it turned many of his friends into enemies.
“He was doing it, long before young practitioners were chastised for calling people out publicly,” Brooks said. “He was the architect of mass protests in this country. The first film boycott? William Monroe Trotter.”
In 1915, Trotter organized a boycott and mass protests to ban screenings of "Birth of a Nation," a racist film dramatizing the rise of the Ku Klux Klan — and the first film ever screened at the White House. Trotter pushed back on President Woodrow Wilson's decision to show the movie, though that wasn't their first disagreement. Wilson had campaigned on the promise that he would treat all citizens equally, and Trotter supported him. Once elected, Wilson segregated the federal workforce — so Trotter led a delegation to the White House with a petition signed by 20,000 people in protest.
“Trotter goes to the White House and challenges the president so much so that President Woodrow Wilson said of him that ‘Your tone offends me’ and then promptly kicked him out of the White House,” Brooks said.
A century later, Daunasia Yancey, an activist with the Boston chapter of Black Lives Matter, said she experienced a similar pushback in 2015 during a tense meeting with then-presidential candidate Hilary Clinton and members of Boston BLM who confronted Clinton about racial injustice in America.
“I don’t believe you change hearts,” Clinton told the group. “I believe you change laws.”
Yancey said she was unfamiliar at the time with Trotter’s legacy, or his tone and tactics that parallel her own.
“I hadn't really read much about William Monroe Trotter, but it’s got me feeling fired up because that's exactly what we're about, and we faced the same pushback about how those are not the tactics we need to use. Even from Hilary Clinton herself, who told us that if you want to get something done, you need to use policy,” Yancey said. “To see that Trotter was implementing the same tactics of direct action and public call-outs is not surprising at all, because we got it from somewhere. Even if young activists haven't been exposed to his work, we still live in that legacy.”
That, Brooks says, is Trotter's legacy, his life's work: not to be a household name, but to inspire future generations.
“I'm not entirely sure he would care too much about whether or not he was acknowledged as opposed to whether or not he was heeded,” Brooks said. “What I do know is that a great many folks are drawing from a well that they may not be aware is there and that was dug for them.”
Correction: this article has been updated to clarify the location of William Monroe Trotter's death.
