Home / Full timeline / Civil Rights activist William Monroe Trotter founds the Black newspaper, The Boston Guardian, to advocate for equal justice.

Civil Rights activist William Monroe Trotter founds the Black newspaper, The Boston Guardian, to advocate for equal justice.

1901 (Oct 15)

William Monroe Trotter, a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Harvard University, founded The Boston Guardian, a Black newspaper that demanded full equality for Blacks and spoke out against Booker T. Washington's policies on grounds that they were too accommodating. Trotter opened the Guardian offices in the same building where William Lloyd Garrison had published The Liberator, and where Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin was printed. In editing The Guardian, Trotter abandoned a career as an insurance executive because, he said, "the conviction grew upon me that pursuit of business, money, civic, or literary position was like building a house upon sands; if race prejudice and persecution and public discrimination for mere color was to spread up from the South and result in a fixed caste of color, every colored American would be really a civil outcast, forever an alien, in the public life." Trotter confronted Booker T. Washington to voice his differing views on July 30, 1903, at the Columbus Avenue African Zion Church in Boston. Trotter and his followers were arrested for heckling Washington; Trotter was sentenced to thirty days in jail. He explained that he had resorted to a public confrontation with Washington because the "Tuskegee Kingpin" held a monopoly on the American media and opposing views could not be heard. The treatment of Trotter in Boston inspired W.E.B. Du Bois to become more active in the opposition to Washington. Trotter collaborated with Du Bois in the organization of the Niagara Movement but declined a position of leadership in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) because of his distrust of whites. Yet Trotter continued his career as a Civil Rights activist. In 1906, he protested President Theodore Roosevelt's discharge of the Black soldiers involved in the Brownsville, Texas, riot. In 1910, Trotter led a demonstration against a Boston performance of The Clansman, an anti-Black play. In 1913, he accused President Woodrow Wilson of lying after Wilson had denied responsibility for segregation in the government cafeterias of Washington, D.C. Two years later, Trotter landed in jail for picketing the showing of the anti-Black film Birth of a Nation. In 1919, when the Paris Peace Conference convened, Trotter applied for a passport. He wanted to attend this world forum to present the grievances of American Blacks. When the United States government denied his visa, Trotter obtained a job as a cook on a transatlantic ship and managed to reach Europe anyway. As a representative for the National Equal Rights League and for the Race Petitioners, Trotter supported the Japanese motion to include a prohibition against discrimination in the Covenant of the League of Nations. The Western Allies, which included the United States, opposed such a provision. Trotter had been born in Boston in 1872. After earning a Bachelor of Arts degree from Harvard University, he returned for his master's, which he received in 1895. In his final years, his money and energy dwindling, Trotter continued to agitate for equal rights. He died in 1934.