William Monroe Trotter
Organization founder
1872 – 1934
Who was William Monroe Trotter?
William Monroe Trotter was a newspaper editor and real estate businessman based in Boston, Massachusetts, and an activist for African-American civil rights. He was an early opponent of the accommodationist race policies of Booker T. Washington, and in 1901 founded the Boston Guardian, an independent African-American newspaper, as a vehicle to express that opposition. Active in protest movements for civil rights throughout the 1900s and 1910s, he also revealed some of the differences within the African-American community. He contributed to the formation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
Born into a well-to-do family and raised in Hyde Park, Massachusetts, Trotter earned his undergraduate and graduate degrees at Harvard University, and was the first man of color to earn a Phi Beta Kappa key there. Seeing an increase in segregation in northern facilities, he began to engage in a life of activism, to which he devoted his assets. He joined with W.E.B. Du Bois in founding the Niagara Movement in 1905, a forerunner of the NAACP. Trotter's style was often divisive, and he ended up leaving that organization and founding the National Equal Rights League.
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- Born
- Apr 7, 1872
Chillicothe - Parents
- Nationality
- United States of America
- Education
- Harvard University
- Lived in
- Boston
- Died
- Apr 7, 1934
Boston
Submitted
on July 23, 2013
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