William Monroe Trotter, sometimes just Monroe Trotter (April 7, 1872 – April 7, 1934), was a newspaper editor and real estate businessman based in Boston, Massachusetts. 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 he used 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 (NAACP).
Trotter was born into a well-to-do family and raised in Hyde Park, Massachusetts. J. M. Trotter a Recorder of Deeds and Virginia Trotter were his parents. He earned his graduate and post-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 for the National Equal Rights League. His protest activities were sometimes seen to be at cross purposes to those of the NAACP.
In 1914, he had a highly publicized meeting with President Woodrow Wilson, in which he protested Wilson's introduction of segregation into the federal workplace. In Boston, Trotter succeeded in shutting down productions of The Clansman in 1910, but he was unsuccessful in 1915 with screenings of the movie The Birth of a Nation, which also portrayed the Ku Klux Klan in favorable terms. He was not able to influence the peace talks at the end of World War I, and was in later years a marginalized voice of protest. In 1921, in an alliance with Roman Catholics, he got a revival screening of The Birth of a Nation banned. He died on his 62nd birthday after a possibly suicidal fall from his Boston home.
Early life and education
William was the third child, and first to survive infancy, of James Monroe Trotter and Virginia (Isaacs) Trotter. His father James was born into slavery in Mississippi; James' mother Letitia was enslaved, and his father was her white master Richard S. Trotter. Letitia, her son and two daughters were freed by their master after his marriage and sent to Cincinnati, Ohio, which had a thriving free black community. After working as a teacher, James Trotter enlisted in the United States Colored Troops during the American Civil War, and was the first man of color to be promoted to lieutenant in the 55th Regiment of the Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry (Colored).
Virginia Isaacs, also of mixed race, was born free in 1842 in either Ohio or Virginia. Her mother Ann-Elizabeth Fossett was born into slavery at Monticello, where she was a daughter of Joseph Fossett and Edith Hern Fossett, and great granddaughter of Elizabeth Hemings. Virginia's father Tucker Isaacs was a free person of color. He purchased the freedom of Ann-Elizabeth Fossett, Virginia's mother. The family moved to Chillicothe in the free state of Ohio, where Virginia grew up in its thriving black community. There she met and married James Trotter.
Shortly after the Civil War, the Trotters moved from Ohio to settle in Boston, Massachusetts. After their first two children died in infancy, they returned to the Isaacs farm of Virginia's parents, where their son William Monroe Trotter was born on April 7, 1872. When he was seven months old, the family moved back to Boston, where they settled in the South End, far from the predominantly African-American west side of Beacon Hill. The family later moved to suburban Hyde Park, a white neighborhood. The Trotters had two more children, both daughters.