Hosted by Historic New England
Thursday, March 25, 5:00 p.m. ET
Register here
Join historian Kerri Greenidge for this illuminating online talk on civil rights activist William Monroe Trotter (1872–1934). With the stylistic verve of a newspaperman and the unwavering fearlessness of an emancipator, Trotter 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 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, 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.
