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Trotter’s Guardian newspaper advocated African American advancement

Chronicled black Boston 64 years before the Banner

From the Banner Archives
Trotter’s Guardian newspaper advocated African American advancement
William Monroe Trotter

Since 1965, the Bay State Banner has been the newspaper of record in Boston’s African American community. But the Banner’s 50 years of news coverage are just one chapter in the history of black publications in Boston.

Sixty-four years before the Banner began publishing, the Guardian began to record the opinions, struggles and events of black Boston. Its publisher, William Monroe Trotter, stands as one of the preeminent black thinkers of the 20th century.

The son of James Trotter, an ex-slave and civil war veteran, William was raised in Hyde Park. After working a year as a shipping clerk, Trotter attended Harvard University. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1895, the first African American to be awarded that honor.

After college, Trotter had trouble finding a job in Boston. The barriers to black advancement precluded educated African Americans from all but the most menial jobs. Trotter took up the family business of real estate — a field that bought him a relative degree of prosperity.

But politics was Trotter’s true calling. The bitter yoke of oppression, intensified during the era of reconstruction, gave birth to a generation of black activists who battled tirelessly for the rights of African Americans. Nationally, Booker T. Washington was recognized as the preeminent black leader, a power broker whose go slow approach to the “negro problem” as it was then called, earned him the friendship of white liberals and the enmity of black radicals.

Segregation

In Boston, discrimination and racial segregation were rampant. Trotter joined the Massachusetts Racial Protective Association where he met with other blacks to organize opposition to a growing number of lynchings in the South and the atmosphere of hostility toward blacks in the North. Trotter and fellow activists Rev. William Scott and George W. Forbes founded the Guardian in 1901, Boston’s first black weekly.

The mission of the Guardian was to be “an organ which is to voice intelligently the needs and aspirations of the colored American.” The first issue appeared November 9, 1901 and cost a nickel.

Although Forbes and Scott eventually left the Guardian staff, for Trotter it became his life mission. “With its establishment,” Trotter said, “my decision to enter the lists against discrimination because of color took a tangible form.”

The Guardian began on a controversial note, levelling attacks at Booker T. Washington. By then, Washington controlled what was widely known as the Tuskegee Machine. From his base at Tuskegee University, a black college in Alabama, Washington preached a message of tolerance.

“We shall not agitate for political or social equality,” he said in his famous Atlanta Compromise speech. “Living separately, yet working together, both races will determine the future of our beloved South.”

Washington advocated that blacks should work in agriculture, tending to the fields while whites worked in industry. He preached against giving blacks the right to vote and teaching black students the classics, arguing that instead blacks should learn trades.

Trotter clashed with Washington in July, 1903 in what came to be known as the Boston Riot. Washington and his followers met at the Columbus Ave. AME Church to organize the National Negro Business League.

Trotter had published the week before a challenge to Washington. “In view of the fact that you are understood to be unwilling to insist upon the negro having his every right (both civil and political), would it not be a calamity at this juncture to make you our leader?” Trotter wrote.

“Don’t you know you would help the race more by exposing the new form of slavery just outside the gates of Tuskegee than by preaching submission? Are the rope and the torch all that the race is to get under your leadership?”

Trotter and his followers disrupted Washington’s meeting at Columbus Ave. AME by shouting questions at Washington. The shouting match escalated into a shoving match and Trotter was arrested for inciting riot, imprisoned for a month at the Charles Street Jail and fined $50. He continued to write articles for the Guardian from his cell.

A new ally

Trotter found a vocal anti-Booker T. Washington ally in W. E. B. Du Bois, a fellow Harvard graduate and professor at Atlanta College. Du Bois later said of the paper, “The Guardian was bitter, satirical and personal, but it was well edited, it was earnest and it published facts. It attracted wide attention across the country; it was quoted and discussed.”

After Trotter’s arrest, Du Bois and other opponents of Washington met with the Boston Publisher and planned a meeting of radical forces. In 1905, Trotter, Du Bois and 27 others founded the Niagara Movement to advocate for full civil rights for blacks. The Niagara Movement was a precursor to the National Association to the Advancement of Colored People.

Although Trotter attended the founding meeting of the NAACP in New York in 1909, he devoted his energies to the running of the Guardian. Trotter distrusted the white leadership of the fledgling NAACP and espoused more radical views.

The Guardian became Trotter’s life’s mission. He devoted his time, energy and financial resources to the publication. At the same time, he continued his activism. In 1914, Trotter went to the White House to protest the segregation of black federal employees in the work place. After a vexatious exchange with President Woodrow Wilson in his office, Trotter and his followers were asked to leave.

In 1915, Trotter led a boycott of the Tremont Theatre over the showing of the racist D.W. Griffifths film “Birth of a Nation.” Trotter was arrested after he refused to leave the lobby of the cinema.

Trotter fought discriminatory hiring practices at Boston City Hospital in 1929. His efforts led to the admission of two black women to the nursing program there.

In 1930, a competing paper, the Chronicle began publication, cutting into the Guardian’s revenues. With the onset of the depression, Trotter struggled to put out the Guardian, draining his financial resources. He persevered until 1934, when he died after a fall from the roof of his Lower Roxbury apartment building that many called a suicide.

Trotter’s sister, Maude Trotter Steward, and her husband, Dr. Charles Steward, a dentist, continued to publish the Guardian until 1957.