1872-1934
The Guardian of Boston

Background.

William Monroe Trotter's father, James Monroe Trotter, was an imposing man. A musician and soldier, he had succeeded Frederick Douglass as recorder of deeds in the District of Columbia and so had been one of the highest-ranking black officials in nineteenth-century America. William Monroe Trotter, who usually went by his middle name, was born on a farm in Ohio but grew up in Hyde Park, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston. The only black in his high school class, he was elected class president. He entered Harvard in 1891. After college he worked negotiating real estate mortgages and seemed destined to become one of Boston's most successful businessmen.

Call to Action.

But in 1901 Trotter launched a newspaper devoted to the cause of civil rights for blacks. He was moved to start his paper by the rising tide of racial hatred in...