Winner • Mark Lynton History Prize Winner • Peter J. Gomes Memorial Book Prize (Massachusetts Historical Society) Shortlisted • Cundill History PrizeNew York Times • Times Critics Top Books of the Year Finalist • Massachusetts Book AwardsThis 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.
Kerri K. Greenidge is Mellon Associate Professor at Tufts University. Her previous book, Black Radical: The Life and Times of William Monroe Trotter, won the 2020 Mark Lynton History Prize, among other awards. She lives in Westborough, Massachusetts.
Table of Contents
Introduction: Looking Out from the Dark Tower ix
Chapter 1 Abolition's Legacy: Radical Racial Uplift and Political Independence 1
Chapter 2 Becoming the Guardian: The Perils of Conservative Racial Uplift 30
Chapter 3 The Greatest Race Paper in the Nation 63
Chapter 4 Of Riots, Suffrage Leagues, and the Niagara Movement 99
Chapter 5 Negrowump Revival 133
Chapter 6 The New Negro Legacy of the Trotter-Wilson Conflict 165
Chapter 7 From The Birth of a Nation to the National Race Congress 201