Black Radical: The Life and Times of William Monroe Trotter, with Kerri Greenidge (episode183)

Hi, I’m Jake.
From his Harvard graduation in 18 95 to his death in 1934 William Monroe Trotter was one of the most influential and uncompromising advocates for the rights of black Americans.
He was a leader who had the vision to co found groups like the Niagara Movement and the NAACP.
But he also had an ego that prevented him from working effectively within the movements that he started.
He was a critic of Booker T. Washington and an early ally of Marcus Garvey Monroe.
Trotter was the publisher of the influential black newspaper The Boston Guardian, and he’s the subject of a new biography by Tufts professor Kerri Greenidge called Black Radical The Life and Times of William Monroe Trotter.

[1:04] But before Kerri joins me to talk about the book, it’s time for this week’s upcoming historical event for upcoming event. This week we’re featuring a Boston History happy hour brought to you by us.
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To nerd Out on Boston history.
If we can’t go to the bar, we’re gonna bring the bar to you with Boston History Bar Trivia.
Fire up your webcam for your favorite beverage and join a happening socially distance party.

[1:47] If you’re in, check out the show notes. This week it hub history dot com slash 183 for instructions on how to join.
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Thanks for your support in this pandemic season, and now it’s time for this week’s main topic.
Carrie Greenidge is an associate professor in the Department of Race, Colonialism and Diaspora, a Tufts University.
She’s also the author of Black Radical. The Life and Times of William Monroe Trotter, which was published in November 2019.
Carrie Greenidge. Welcome to the show.

Kerri Interview:
[3:18] Thank you for having me.

Jake Interview:
[3:20] I have invited you here today to talk about your new book, Black Radical. The Life and times of William and wrote Trotter.
And if I was gonna hang up on you right now, I could walk out my front door and in about 10 minutes, probably I could walk to Monroe Trotters grave.
And yet I had never heard of him until just the past two or three years.
To the extent that I hear Monroe Trotter mentioned, his usually mentioned is a foil, an antagonist of Booker T. Washington.
But he doesn’t come out of nowhere to challenge Washington.
If you can start us from the beginning, can you tell us how the Trotter family ended up moving to Massachusetts and to Hyde Park?

Kerri Interview:
[4:01] Well, thank you for that. I do believe that that Trotter is overlooked, even amongst people who study African American history and the African American radical tradition.
So Trotter was born in 18 72 actually, in Chile Coffee, Ohio.
His father was James Monroe Trotter and his father was born, enslaved in Mississippi and in a little town called Grand Gulf and his father, James Monroe.
Trotter, born in 18 42 escaped from slavery with his mother in the late 18 forties.
Um became a lieutenant in the Massachusetts 55th Regiment and moved to Boston in 18 65 and married a fellow woman from Ohio named.

[4:51] Virginia Isaacs and Virginia.
Isaacs was the daughter of um Free People from Charlottesville, Virginia, who were descendants of enslaved people in Charlottesville and, um, at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello.
And so his parents in antebellum America came from a long line of people who routed their radical political outlook within the black community itself, and particularly within the fight against enslavement,
and his parents.
His father moved to Massachusetts because his father, James Trotter, got a job in the Federal Post office in 18 65 and this was a position that was,
provided for a handful, practically six in Boston of black veterans of the Army who were given posts in the federal government.
So his father got his job in Station A in Boston, which was the busiest station Federal post office in the city of Boston.
And he moved his wife and eventually his son, who was born in Chile coffee and then brought as an infant to Boston.
So they made the reader Boston, and they became part of a burgeoning black, middle and upper class within the city of Boston and across New England that, uh, rose in the years after the civil War.

Jake Interview:
[6:13] And I would just as a sidebar, encourage our readers listeners, I should say, to go back to our episode 1 54 as I checked, as you were just speaking for Interview with Dr Millington Burgers and Lockwood.

Kerri Interview:
[6:26] Oh, yes. Wonderful work.

Jake Interview:
[6:28] And he discusses James Trotters career in a lot, a lot of detail in that book.

Kerri Interview:
[6:32] Yes. Yes, sir.

Jake Interview:
[6:33] So when the family moves here to the Boston area,
they settle in the Reedville neighborhood in Hyde Park, and you describe in the book that they really struggled to rent or buy a house here in Hyde Park.
Despite being by that time, I fairly well to do family. Why was that?

Kerri Interview:
[6:54] Hyde Park at the time, post Civil War was still considered its own town.
It was very ah, country town, really up until the late 19th century.
And so James Charter really fell in love with the Vivareal section because that’s where Camp MiGs, Woz and Camp MiGs was, where he trained with the 55th Massachusetts Regiment when he enlisted in 18 63. So he really liked Hyde Park.
You thought it was beautiful. He also did not like Boston City Proper, which was known as a place of really kind of hard living and particular for African Americans and segregation.
And so he saw High Park. He decided to move their Hyde Park.
At that time, the 18 seventies had a small yet growing cohort of liberal white Protestant reformers.

[7:43] Theater Weld, who was a veteran of the at abolitionist movement, lived in Fairmount, which is where the trotters eventually moved.
And so when Trotter a visually came to Ah Hyde Park, he rented house Ah house from a family called Leverett family who were known to vento African Americans. But ah, lot of the people who sold their property would not sell to African Americans.
One of the a few people who did was a woman named Hittable Southern Sunderland, who herself was a former abolitionist.
And she would rent to people, although she discovers people from, ah, black people from buying on. And it really wasn’t until 18 73 when there was a depression, one of the most drastic depressions of the 19th century.
And many of the people who had purchased house lots in Hyde Park basically sold off their their property to gain some the savage, whatever money they could.
And that’s how he ended up being able to purchase two properties on Williams Avenue in Hyde Park.

Jake Interview:
[8:42] And he goes on to leverage that experience in real estate in tow, essentially a real estate business for much of the rest of his life, right?

Kerri Interview:
[8:49] Yes, so, uh, James Trotter, in addition to his job at the post office, and then he left the post office.
Eventually he invested in purchasing property throughout 18 73 and into the 18 eighties, So he had properties. By the end of his life, in 18 92 James Trotter had properties in Dorchester and in Roxbury.
Andi had the two homes in Hyde Park, and he had an additional home in Hyde Park that he owned. And he left these to his his wife when he when he passed in 18 92.

Jake Interview:
[9:20] Well, if those were in Fairmount Hill, I wish I had that many properties in Fairmount Hill today.

Kerri Interview:
[9:24] Yes, yes, exactly.

Jake Interview:
[9:27] I’m not sure exactly how to ask this question, but you note in the book that Monroe and William Monroe Trotter was known, I guess at the time, by his middle name, Monroe primarily. Right. So you note that he stood out as being a very light skinned boy.
Do you think his complexion changed? How he experienced sort of the the background day to day racism that people would have experienced in late 19th century high? Parker, Boston.

Kerri Interview:
[9:54] Um, that’s actually interesting question. I think that, um he himself compared to the rest of the family was actually darker than his in complexion than his sisters and his mother.

Jake Interview:
[10:00] Yeah. Ah, interesting.

Kerri Interview:
[10:05] Um and he and his father were both darker than his mother and his two sisters.
Um, the small black community that was in High Park and also in neighbouring areas of dead um was a black community that waas,
predominantly people of lighter skin tone, Um, and New England and General at the end of the Civil War was known as an area of the country where about 1/3 of all African Americans were defined as mulatto.
Now what that means we have to kind of think in 19 century terms.
That could mean they were actually mixed race or could mean that they were people who had a lighter complexion.
So, um, most African Americans in Boston at the time, although members of the upper class were definitely lighter in complexion predominantly,
then the people who were of the working classes, um, in Boston in particular, it was known as a city where.

[11:03] So many of the black community were defined as lotto again, which is as a derogatory term in in today’s turn.
If it was a term that they used, those who were known as that is being lighter skinned were, you know, 1/3 of the population.
So, um, his experience with racism, particularly in Hyde Park, was one, Um that, um, wasn’t any worse.
Come then, his neighbors, but also wasn’t any any better. The one thing he did have was that his father was well known in the town.
And one of the things I point out in the book is that, you know, much like a lot of things in Boston’s history, racism and racial animus had it changes over time.

[11:47] And so Trotter Senior was very well respected in Hyde Park.
He was actually the Lamplighter in the city in the last years of his life, and he was a member of the integrated Grand Army of the Republic s O kind of.
On the surface of it, and the things I say in the book, their lives, particularly compared to other parts of New England and other parts of the country, were pretty the affected and kind of in this bubble in Hyde Park.
But Aziz, you allude to. In the book, he and his sisters were called names.
He was often the only black kid in his class where he was, um, you know, bullied by other students for being black.
So it’s kind of this this dance I call it kind of in New England in Boston history, where you have on one hand, high this liberal, racial and tolerant history generally.
But on the individual level, there’s often, um, sort of acts of racial aggression and then kind of systemically there’s there’s also a visual inequity.

Jake Interview:
[12:50] Well, you mentioned Monroe Trotters education. I do want to touch on that cause while he later in life will live for a long time in Dorchester, you’ll settle sort of in the South in lower Roxbury area.
All his formative years is growing up. Years are all in Hyde Park. If I had that correct.
So he graduates from High Park High. Which generations later is that at the heart of the bussing crisis in Boston?
But I think it was a very different Hyde Park high at the time. When you’re Trotter went there. What was this educational experience like?

Kerri Interview:
[13:21] So when wrote Trotters attended the Hyde Park tools and this is the 18 eighties, 18 seventies and 18 eighties, and Hyde Park was actually known because it was a country town.
It was really known as having some of the best schools in the state public schools, and most of the schools were attended by the Children of, um, white Protestant Brahman,
Mill class or upper middle class white Children.
This changes drastically by even in 18 nineties, But there was like this window, a period from roughly 18 fifties through the 18 eighties, when Trotter was a child.
So the public schools were very good. The the, um, resource is within that school system.
Where were very good. He joined his first temperance league as, ah, you know, junior high school student. He participated in the yearly concepts. That’s all the school Children in Hyde Park gave to the town.

[14:18] And so he was a very gifted student, which was recognized very early on. His name is in like local Hyde Park newspapers and Norfolk Gazette’s.
From the time he’s like seven up until he graduates. He graduated in 18 90 wanted to become a minister.
His father, however, told him that to be common minister was to basically be designed to segregated pulpits where his petitioners were not get.
The same resource is. And so Trotter applied to Harvard. He got into Harvard, attended 18 91.
Graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 18 95 from Harvard on DNA Ever rent below third in his class.
And waas, um, at Harvard, lowest grade.
He actually received, ironically, wasn’t English, But, you know, the rest of his his career was, you know, stellar.
And he basically, um, was somebody who saw Harvard as a link to fellow African American, um, elite thinkers,
on that feeling, what launched his public political career.

Jake Interview:
[15:27] One detail that I would have never known without reading the book is that James Trotter, other way encouraged, will encourage Monroe to go to Harvard. He didn’t offer to pay the tuition, although I think he did for his sisters.

Kerri Interview:
[15:37] Okay? Yes. And it bubbles dynamics of when I was researching the book, what was fascinating was,
that, um, you know, the traditional narrative for scholars who would look at Trotter was that Oh, he’s like this favored son of his father, Jason Road Trotter, and actually James Monroe.
Trotter was very clear in the few Redding’s we have that his daughters, Monroe’s sisters, had a sister named, um, Bessie, who was the youngest who was born in 18 83.
And then he had another sisterly mod. And so both of those sisters were basically adored.
They got kind of all the accoutrements of, like an upper middle class life.
They were encouraged geo piano lessons and his sister when he died. When James Carter died in 18 92 he left a large sum of money for the girl’s education.
But he was really kind of this tough love approach to Monroe, which was that he was gonna pay his own way and that any money he would get was kind of put into the bank and administered by, um, uh, Jay’s moat, Monroe Trotter’s wife, Monroe’s mother.

Jake Interview:
[16:42] So how did Monroe make ends meet and managed to pay for, Ah, Harvard Education?

Kerri Interview:
[16:47] Well, he basically applied for scholarships. He worked, so he actually, one of his jobs was selling desks in high Park.
Um, he lived in the cheapest dorm at the time, and so he worked throughout his time in Harvard, Um, and paid his own way, his own tuition.
Um, and then when he graduated, he being black. He found it very difficult to get a, um, job that matched his Harvard degree. He wasn’t sort of called back by anybody in 18 95.
And so he went and founded his own real estate firm, which was very lucrative.
One of the most lucrative real estate firms in the city in Boston at the time.
Andi, that’s what sort of allowed him to have four time at least, the disposable income to start his newspaper.

Jake Interview:
[17:39] By the time Monroe Trotter was at Harvard, he say’s making connections with other African Americans and becoming what we consider an African American radical thinker.
By that time, obviously, Booker T. Washington wouldn’t have known about a snot nosed Harvard kid.
But Washington must have been looming very large in the lives of Trotter and his cohort, and the conservatism of Washington must have played a large role in forming their outlooks.

Kerri Interview:
[18:09] Yeah, So one of the things up, pretty Washington sounds are founded. Tuskegee Institute in 18 81.
And, um, throughout the 18 eighties, Washington Waas really known as the rising leader amongst, uh, the African American population in the aftermath of reconstruction.
And part of that was due Teoh sort of literature on Washington would would would support this was due to the way that Washington approached or did not approach.
Politics of Washington’s rhetoric was that African Americans, newly freed from slavery,
needed to forgo participation in electoral politics and concentrate instead on racial up left, which is the notion that you know education and pull yourself up by your bootstraps and,
get a skill, and that, basically, that would then lead to an end to the very sort of violent racial violence that was occurring in the South during and after reconstruction.
So that was Washington’s program, and through that he gained a lot of support from New Englanders, particularly very, very wealthy industrialist.

[19:13] Who gave money to Tuskegee Institute and to um transformed Washington into really the most powerful black man in America until his death in 1915.
And Trotter and his cohorts knew about Washington. So they’re all part kind, this little small cadre of of college, educated or college teaching African Americans across the country.
But Trotter’s main criticism of Booker T. Washington, which is trying to pointed out many elite African Americans, had time was that he, um, basically sold.
Astrada would say his race for, ah, mess of pottage, that he was more interested in appeasing ah, white racism and the American racial system.
Then he was with confronting it and that he was more likely than not to sympathize with the virulent, violent white supremacist violence that was occurring across the South and across the country at the time.

[20:19] So um, trotters belief was that the average African American person, particularly in the northern cities, was being harmed directly by Washington’s rhetoric. And he had a lot of evidence to support that aside point in the book.
And not only that, but that Washington could not possibly be a leader because he was tasked with the impossible goal is W E book.
He beat boys, put it of being a leader for white people about how black people were experiencing the world, right?
And so Trotter was very adamant that Washington did that role well, but he could not possibly meet the needs and the demands of African American people.

Jake Interview:
[21:01] Before long, Trotter is gonna have some very public ah, confrontations with Washington. But before we get there, some things have to change.
Our 18 95. He’s gonna graduate from Harvard. 18 96. He’s a real estate investor.
18 99. He gets married to a young woman named Geraldine Pindell and moves to suburban Dorchester.
You said it was very hard to research their their romance and the relationship, I guess. Dini’s early life and then the relationship between the two of them. Why was that such a challenge?

Kerri Interview:
[21:37] Well, one of things I’m There are letters in which Trotter talks about his relationship with Dini.
Money talks about definitely his love for her. One of things I point out in the book, though, is that Trotter was definitely a misogynist, For better or for worse, Um, he grew up believing,
that, um, the women is like, particularly his sisters.
His mother and his wife were, um, kind of the people who are supposed to constantly support his, um, his newspaper publishing.
And so one of the things I point to in the book is that I surmise, and you know, I don’t have any,
proof of this, except for the lack of information we have about her from Trotter is that he really didn’t talk much about his wife except for in her capacity as helping him,
um, and given the records for all in but particularly African American woman in late 19 century, it’s very difficult to trace her her history.
We know that she was laid to the pin del’s, who were black family from Maryland who migrated to Boston in the 18 fifties.
Our father attended Harvard briefly in the 18 seventies and then left and became, um, a ah, hairdresser and then eventually a, um, a work in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
She grew up in Everitt. She lived in Veer for a little while, but we don’t really know much about her background, um, or her life, because she also so far as I can tell, did not leave with a diary or her own set of letters.

[23:05] Once she married Monroe in 18 99.
Um, and he started the Guardian 1901 Dini. His wife, as she was called, basically became the person who ran the day to day of running a newspaper. You know, like subscriptions and making sure people paid and the print on the type and all that type of stuff.
Um, so my suspicion is that part of that is due to,
because Dini herself, as far as I can tell that it could happen with the book coming out, people find, you know, in some archive her, her writings or her self.
But, um, so far, we haven’t found any of her her own writings about herself, and so therefore we have to rely on her from Trotter, who was often very sort of self absorbed in terms of his own.

Jake Interview:
[23:50] When they have have her reflected in what he said as he’s talking about himself. Essentially.

Kerri Interview:
[23:53] Exactly, exactly exactly.

Jake Interview:
[23:56] So you mentioned the big change in 1901 is the founding of The Boston Guardian, this newspaper, that Trotter will run for the rest of his life and then model run after that.
And that gives him the platform that he then uses to gain national prominence to be a critic of Washington’s.
How did he and ah, partner named George Forbes decide to get into newspaper publishing?

Kerri Interview:
[24:21] Well trotters criticism was that the Black Press, which began,
in 18 27 in New York amongst three African Americans, that the black press had his particular role to play, and that was that it had to, as he said, Hold a mirror up to nature.
That’s a Shakespeare quote, basically had to be a conduit for challenging the status quo and agitating for racial justice rather than a medium to support the visual status quo.
And so, by the 18 eighties, the one new savor that was still doing that was called the New York Age, and it was run out of New York by a man named T.
Thomas Fortune. And that was the newspaper that Trotter grew up with, which had all these sort of very sophisticated political critiques of both the Democratic and Republican Party of.

[25:09] Racial violence in the South of all of labour, of the fact that black people need to become allied with labour interests.
So that was a newspaper he grew up reading. And then, by the 18 nineties, Theo, editor of that paper T.
Thomas Fortune, came under the spell, so to speak, of Booker T.
Washington and Washington really changed the the character that paper on.
There is evidence that Washington purposely brought up black newspapers to control how African Americans were portrayed and to control any criticism of Tuskegee and Booker T.
Washington himself. So trotters first goal and becoming a newspaper man, as he wrote writes to his friends.
And 8 1901 is that he was tired of seeing there will be no independent venue that was talking about the realities of racial segregation, violence and disfranchised across the country.
And so he wanted to create his own newspaper that would expose that.

[26:07] And, as he said, uh, tell colored people as he called African Americans at the time,
that they could decide their own political destiny, that they didn’t have to kind of rely on the lies that were being spouted from Tuskegee and kind of the the broader American context of racial segregation, industry and guys Mint.

Jake Interview:
[26:26] I did find it interesting. You mentioned that Trotter used the word color, does it descriptor throughout his life.
And and I noticed that you throughout the book, even when it’s not a direct quote, used a lot of the 19th century language around race was that just so it wouldn’t be jarring to switch back and forth in nomine creature.

Kerri Interview:
[26:42] Well, I really wanted the book to be about black people and raised in New England.
And, um, one of the things I wanted to make sure of and point out to kind of is a sub or,
motif in the book is that the concept of race in the concept of blackness, particularly at the end of the 19th century, was constantly changing and being framed by black people themselves.
And so Trotter was somebody who believed that the term colored describe the vast ethnicities and cultural backgrounds of African Americans at the end of the Civil War.
Right, he pointed out that no 10% of all black Bostonians throughout his life were foreign born, right?
And so what did that mean, if they came, like from Caribbean or they came from Cape Verdi and they defined themselves differently.
So he thought that color people was the way to define that in.
And he also was very attuned to the fact that addition to being foreign born New England black population,
was ah had a large minority of people who were of some form of mixed race or identifies of mixed race.
So he really believed that blackness Waas, um was defined by being inherently international,
full of different ethnic groups of people and kind of composed of people who came from the African diaspora as opposed to the term Negro.

Jake Interview:
[28:08] And we’ll probably talk about this more a little down the road. But it seems like most of his career has spent trying to build all encompassing organizations. Sort of these broad pan African movements is very optimistic whether or not it never worked out very well.

Kerri Interview:
[28:22] Yes. I mean, he really saw, um that particularly in the American South African Americans were disfranchised by 1900,
you know, subject to horrendous facial violence and discrimination and segregation.
And so he saw that black people in the North, um or colored people outside the south, as he called them, had an obligation to use what little power they had in places like a Massachusetts or New York to, um,
put political pressure on,
both the Democratic and the Republican Party’s at the time.
Um, and he really saw this as his career progressed as something that waas,
um encompass all people who were the victims of some form of of colonialism, either in the Caribbean or in Africa, and that they were united in their need to,
politically agitate for their rights and for justice.

Jake Interview:
[29:19] Before he gets to that point, he obviously has to build Ah platform for himself and to create a guess, create a name and reputation for himself. So how does he use the Guardian to start creating a public profile for himself?
And what sort of issues is he using the guardian to tackle in the early years?

Kerri Interview:
[29:37] So the first thing he’s focused on and in the first years, and really throughout the paper, but definitely in the first decade is enforcement of the 13th 14th and 15th amendments, which were passed,
after the Civil War and by the end of reconstruction were nullified weekend by state governments across the country, but particularly in the former Confederacy.
And so his idea was that, you know slavery had been abolished, rights of citizenship came from the 14th Amendment and that the 14th Amendment was being violated,
by the Supreme Court’s very narrow interpretation of of what, you know, equal protection covered.
He also pointed to the 15th Amendment, which gave black men the right to vote.

[30:26] And he argued that enforcement of those amendments was kind of the pinnacle of getting rights for African American people in the United States.
Um, and this was at a time when, um, Southern States in particular, were doing things like in Mississippi, um,
violently overthrowing the duly elected government and instead replacing it with a bad white supremacists who then in their Constitution, disenfranchised the black population, right?
And so he’s He was arguing that, um, America actually had a piece pieces off of judicial oversight, the 13th 14th and 15th amendments,
that could be interpreted, um, and should be interpreted to protect rights of African Americans.
That those those amendments were not being used in that way.
So that was fundamentally his focus. How did he harness on this in terms off activism?
The first thing he did was he was very some attuned into reports from black communities about what the immediate effects of Ignore the 13th and 14th and 15th Amendments had done.
So he chronicled lynchings, borrowing from the work of Ida B.
Wells Barnett, um, covered instances of African Americans try to continue to vote in the South and being violently repressed,
um, covered instances of racial injustice across the country and across the, um particularly across the South, as a way to document what was actually occurring.

[31:53] As a result of rejection or nullification of the reconstruction amendments.
And then he was very good at, um, organizing and galvanizing crowds of people,
um, to show up and to protest in a fashion that people were not used to seeing in the late 19th and early 20th century.
So, for instance, in 1902 there was a case of ah black man named Rogers, who was accused of burning down a white man’s barn in North Carolina.
Rogers fled to Massachusetts. He is then pursued by the authorities in North Carolina,
and Trotter and his followers argued that the 14th Amendment would be violated by Monroe Rodgers being sent back to what would have been a certain lynching in North Carolina.
And that whole case was built around his commitment to the 14th Amendment but also his commitment true, the public, the black public rally around a cause,
that could eventually lead Teoh a masturbation and freedom for the entire race.

Jake Interview:
[32:58] So he’s making leading that effort in 1902 and then by 1903 There is what’s characterized as the Boston Riot that’s led at least a ring led by Monroe Trotter.
And that’s probably one of the things that that he’s most remembered for. Now, that is really just one incident in a very long career.
What happened at this famous 1903 meeting at his eye on a M E church in Boston that we end up remembering as the Boston riot.

Kerri Interview:
[33:30] By 1903 Trotter. The Garden has been around had been around for almost two years, and in that time, Trotters main call was for an organization that he was referring to is the National Equal Rights League.
And what he wanted to happen was he wanted African Americans Teoh question their allegiance to the Republican Party, which of course, was considered the party of Lincoln.
Um, he pointed out, as many Northern African Americans pointed out, that the GOP had failed in upholding the 13th 14th and 15th Amendments.
He also was critical of the Democratic Party, which at the time was the party of the segregationist South as a trotter really called for a bold what he called political independence, and the African Americans should vote.

[34:15] For the interests of their race and their communities rather than partisanship.
On DSO, he goes to New York. He went to Louisville to try to get this platform submitted before what was called the Afro American Council, which was the nominal civil rights group run by Booker T.
Washington and T. Thomas Fortune. And every time he showed up for those meetings, he and his supporters were basically shot down by Washington.
Washington would say they couldn’t speak or you tell Trotter the meeting started at like, six of them said it would start three. In trying to drop, it’d be over.
So, daughters, um um, way to handle That was that he published a series of questions, nine questions that he had directly for Booker T.
Washington Basically, along the lines of how has your leadership made life better for African Americans and, of course, talk.
It would say it hasn’t, um and, um, in July 1903.

[35:15] Washington came to Boston for a celebration of Washington’s National Negro Business League, and this was founded in Boston.

[35:24] It was the premiere organization for black businessmen in the country, and Washington, um, comes to Boston to give a plan speech at the Amy Church.
Um, and Trotter showed up, aiming to basically just off the meeting by asking his questions.
And in the midst of this, members and supporters of Trotters newspaper, who were very vocal and very passionate, basically stormed the diess on DWhite.
What the press referred to as the Boston Riot was that, um Trotter was an arrested on.
His supporters were arrested by the police department for disturbing the peace.
Washington tries to speak and eventually confronts you. No pepper on the diets and he starts sneezing. And so then the process starts laughing and all the same thing in the crowd, then surges forward and starts yelling at Washington and demanding that his questions be asked.
So Trotter, for that, was put into jail for 30 days for disturbing the peace he’s put on trial.
And he emerged from that is having this is I call in the book kind of this local, but also the national celebrity right for being somebody, his supporters would argue, who had no challenged power.
Been the first person to point out that, um, Booker T. Washington’s politics were not accepted by all African Americans and that, in fact, Booker T. Washington’s rhetoric was harmful to that community.

Jake Interview:
[36:50] And I’ll point out the listeners that Charles Street Jail is the same jailhouse where the women who challenged President Wilson on suffrage in 1919 were taken and also similarly raised. The profile of their cause.

Kerri Interview:
[37:04] Yes, yes and end charge. The jail was like famous also for one of the places that Sacco and Vanzetti were held in the 19 twenties.

Jake Interview:
[37:14] A lot going on in those four walls that you could now go and have a drink in as Liberty Hotel.

Kerri Interview:
[37:17] I know I was exactly e. I was just thinking the same thing, and I have good cocktails.

Jake Interview:
[37:24] It seems like these leadership during the meeting at the A M E Church, the Zion Amy Church, especially the fact that he, I think for the first time, but certainly not for the last time, spent time in jail around that incident really changes trotters,
public persona, public image.
But it also changes indirectly Hiss financial, standing the fortunes of his paper because soon after that his business partner decides that he’s not in this anymore.
They split ways at that point.
What does that mean for the Guardian for trotters finances, for his relationship with his sort of family and inner circle? It seems like a very pivotal moment for him.

Kerri Interview:
[38:08] Yeah, it was a pill, a pivotal moment on the one hand, and it gave him national fame and notoriety.
It made him amongst working class black people who bet his newspaper in particular a somebody who people,
took a lot of pride in, um, it’s the Guardian began to sell as far west as we know it is Oklahoma and California and so distributed across the country, eventually across into the Caribbean. So inveighs his profile that way.
Um, but George Forbes, who was his partner in the Guardian, um, was somebody who was a businessman.
So George Forbes knew that you can’t just have a newspaper and not manage finances and knuckle after subscriptions and not, you know, except had these very rigid ways of of advertisement policy.
And Forbes left the magazine the newspaper after the Boston riot.

[39:02] Because Forbes argument was that the newspaper was not never kind of a money maker and that it could was not sustainable over the long term.
He was also drug shortage was also threatened by Booker T.
Washington for supporting the guardians of Forbes left Trotter then runs the newspaper by himself with the core cohort of friends and,
supporters, but really the newspaper, until his wife, staff in 1918 became was run and managed by his wife and by his mother and his sisters.
And Trotter himself was never good at money, right? So one of his policies was that he refused to accept Advertising Med renew from, um, skin bleaching companies or hair straightening cos that’s a huge what was a huge former revenue.
And so he’s basically just relying on sales. And he was also so much involved in the cause that he would argue.
Well, if you can’t pay this amount of money, you don’t need to pay for this description.
Just show up at one of our protests, right? So he was not a business person, Um, and luckily, his inheritance that his father eventually was released to him, um, could buy him some time.
So they he and his wife purchased the house in Dorchester area that at the time was predominately white.

[40:19] They, um, continued to run than the newspaper. Trotter works and continue tohave his Villa State business, but then decides to focus on the paper full time.
But then, as the years go on, it quickly becomes clear that that was not sustainable because he was never making money from the paper.

[40:39] He was publishing the paper and going places and talking and testified before Congress and all these things.
But he wasn’t making money off of the newspaper itself.
And so by the time you get to the World War, the paper was really popular amongst people who read it and people who were die hard fans of it.
But it was not something that was going to be a best seller.
And it was also not something that could compete with kind of the advances in newspaper technology that took place in the early 20th century, right?
He didn’t have off the same type of photographs and other newspapers had. So if you look at copies of his paper by, like 1910 you look at something like the Chicago defender the Patriot.
The give me the guardian looks pretty pretty paltry in comparison.
It just in terms of presentation. So, um, by the time you get the world were one, he’s really he’s moved, had to be mortgaged his house multiple times.
He moved out of his home in Dorchester. He and his wife are middle aged in their rooming with her mates and and with supporters better than having their own house and just keeping the the paper running.

Jake Interview:
[41:48] You mentioned that that downward slide in their finances, and especially the move to the South End or lower Roxbury, though it’s damaging for them, is a family.
You wrote that it. It sort of endeared him to his constituency to his readers, and he’s courting a very different group of readers than a lot of the other papers you describe.
A term use a lot throughout the book is the genteel poor who do you picture as the genteel poor that are his, his readers and his supporters.

Kerri Interview:
[42:10] Yes.

[42:17] Um, so gentle port was, Ah, turn my barred from Dorothy West,
Her interviews about growing up in Boston and she would say that the gentle poor were,
the majority of African American people in the city of Boston and its surrounding areas who were, um, did not make a lot of money.
Most of them worked in what we now call like a service industry.
Um, you had a small core of people who were teachers and professionals, but mostly these people, even though they were considered poor vice by Boston standards and had the lowest incomes.
There were also people who are very high achieving right.
There were people who sent their kids to dance class if they could.
They were people who read everything. There were people who took advantage of,
treat nights at the Museum of Fine Arts and people who really took advantage of the sources in the city that we often don’t think of that population is taking advantage of.
They were very, very committed to voting eso the black.
The rate of black voting in the city of Boston was amongst the highest in the country in 1905 on DSO trotters argument,
like Dorothy West argument was like, These were people who were poor, yes, but most of them had high levels of education.

[43:36] Boston’s black community had the highest literacy rate of any black community in the country by 1910.
And, um, really, their poverty came from the systemic racism in the city of Boston, not from the fact that they were in any way a denigrated group of people. So gentle lack of lack of opportunity.

Jake Interview:
[43:55] Is the lack of opportunity.

Kerri Interview:
[43:58] And most of them, you know, where Assad here, towards the end of his life would say, You know, you had graduates of Brown University who were working, they couldn’t get a job anywhere. So they were like the elevator man. I’m in downtown Boston.
And so that was the type of population that characterized Boston at the time.
And so Trotter, that became the people who read his newspaper, Um, much more working class people.
But people who, um, you know, we’re interested in voting people who were activists, people who were, you know, could have conversations about, you know, the tariff policy of women. Howard Taft, right?
Instead of things way that we kind of don’t think of that community having on DSO, he really tapped into that community. Um, the gentle, poor.

Jake Interview:
[44:41] So at the same time that he’s tapping into his community and that his own personal finances air starting to slide.
He’s also embarking on movement building from I guess you could say it starts with the New England Suffrage League, and then that builds out in a much better known movements.
So what was the New England Suffrage League, and then how does that get us to something like the Niagara movement?

Kerri Interview:
[45:09] Okay, So the New England Suffrage League was kind of the carry over from that national Equal Lights Rights League.
That Trotter, um um, was the source of white Trotter approached Washington in 1903 And the New England Suffrage League was part of these national suffrage leagues that took place mostly in the North, to try to,
the store voting rights for African Americans across the country.
And in doing that to mobilize black people who could vote so blacks could vote in the North at the time.

[45:40] To mobilize that population to vote in a way that was going Teoh have a political effect on the situation of racism and discrimination across the country.
And so the national, um new the New England Suffrage League was known for having fundraisers for rallying around, Um ah.
Specific cases of just franchise men across the South for raising money to hire lawyers to, um um, you know, protests legally against segregation and discrimination.
And by 1905 Um, sh rodders,
popularity, um, really caught the eye of others of his supporters throughout the North who argued that wow, his approach might be off putting right.
His main sort of political focus was wet the African American community needed at the time.
And so Trotter was friends with W E. B. Du Bois. They were both at Harvard at the same time, although Du Bois was a graduate student when Trotter was an undergrad.

[46:48] And do boys, um, uh gets in contact with Trotter and with other members of sort of this, um,
educated black, um, middle class working, middle class elite group of people who were really looking for a different political alternative.
And they create created the Niagara Movement, which met in.

[47:13] Niagara Falls in 1905 and eventually argued that the goal of that movement was to use, um, legal, um, support to undermine,
laws that were passed after reconstruction that limited 13th 14th and 15th Amendments.
And so Trotter was really he was referred to by two boys is the John the Baptist of the Night Naggar movement because he basically put,
the platform, Um, the his ideas were that the organization had to be nonpartisan,
that it had to be committed to activism and agitation for civil rights.

Jake Interview:
[47:53] As this John the Baptist figure. He’s sort of presaging a national movement. He’s helping to put it into action, but then he’s not, in the end, leading that movement. In fact, he’s sort of forces the organization to tear itself apart, right?

Kerri Interview:
[48:07] Yes. Um, the one, the one. The thing about Trotter they tried to emphasize in the book is that he was and this was what his contemporaries would say he was, despite starting these movements, these little fires throughout kind of the, um,
pan Africanism community,
so that those communities and cells and change the way the approach politics.
He himself was not a movement person because his personality always gotten away and his rigidity always got in the way.
So with my anger movement, he, um ah was committed to that movement being nonpartisan, right, that black people should not be,
condoning supporting a, uh, the GOP or the Democratic Party or any party, because they need to concentrate on policy on dagger movement,
in Boston, Du Bois hired, um um, the head of the Niagara Movement in Cambridge was a man named Clement Morgan,
who Trotter believed was against him on.
And Trotter also believed that Morgan Waas, a Republican he was he was aligned with the previous governor of Massachusetts as a trotter believed that this was betraying principles and through that,
then basically argue the book, right, those this no adult size tender temper tantrum,
makes it very difficult for the boys to organize and hold meetings,
and that is one of the sources of the collapse of that organization.

Jake Interview:
[49:30] And it sounds like the next time that he works with two boys that it follows kind of the same trajectory. Soon after the dagger movement sort of falling apart, they work together again on what becomes the in double a CP.
But then Trotter almost seems to be working against it.
Eso is helping to build these movements than not really participating in them.
What was his preferred instrument of change at that time?

Kerri Interview:
[49:56] Well, I would I would I would say that he, because he was a radical, he did not like the idea that,
civil rights groups were not let were not lead and decided in their agenda, uh, controlled by African American communities themselves.
And so the end of a lacy P was a perfect example.
It was formed by a group of white liberals, mostly in New York and New England, with the express purpose of doing what Trotter want to do, which was enforced the 13th 14th and 15th Amendments on that wave.
Trotter won that argument because by 1909 the 13 14 15 amendment was considered by reformers as okay, this is the This is where our fight has to lie.
But Trotter’s problem with the end of a lazy P was that it didn’t have black leaders.

[50:44] And in fact, it wasn’t until after World War that it even had branches in the South.
On git was really a in terms off the political conjecture directory.
Many African Americans, but particularly Trotter saw, is very elitist, right?
So it really was focused on using, um, the legal system to come back segregation and disenfranchisement and that’s a slow process, as we know, right?
So the n double a CPIs program was that they would choose cases that they believed they could win to challenge local laws that were discriminatory. And so trotters argument was that in doing that, the end of Lacey P.
Was far removed from the everyday existence of African Americans. That it was too conservative and that really until the 19 late 19 teens it didn’t have black leadership on DSO.
That was his his criticism of the n double a CP. And he created the Negro Independent Political League.

[51:45] To counter that and basically argued that they were the ones who was gonna be led by black people that would have people in black communities elected.
They would decide what it was that they were fighting for. They would raise the money themselves, and he would argue that white people could join.
So one of his big, um supporters were, um ah, Tom Milholland, who was a a, um activist. White activists out of Alabama.
They could join John Honey Fitz did the Kennedys. You know, Patriarch, he was a big supporter of that group of trotters group as well so they could join this good support, but they couldn’t decide the direction of it.
And so that really, if we look at, in addition to his, his prickly personality and his, you know, mercurial nature ideologically, that was really something that was constant.
Was he did. He wanted black communities themselves to evil control the terms of their own, um, appeals for justice.

Jake Interview:
[52:45] Although he’s not active with the organizations that we remember today, like the CPI for very long, he is using his,
membership in leadership in these other more radical groups to maintain a very high level of visibility because we know he’s going to be a critic of Teddy Roosevelt and President Taft.
And then he’s he’s gonna have a lot of back and forth and and personal audiences with President Wilson.
Woodrow Wilson How does Monroe Trotter go from being an early, albeit uneasy, supporter of candidate Wilson, to being one of the biggest critics of President Wilson?

Kerri Interview:
[53:24] Oh, so good. Good question. Woodrow Wilson. Um Waas a Democrat. Woodrow Wilson was governor of New Jersey before he became president. Woodrow Wilson.
However, before he’d been for president, um was somebody who had not yet,
did I have a record of the virulent type of public federal anti black legislation that say a Roosevelt or Taft in so trotters?
Big criticism of Roosevelt was with the the Brownsville incident that took place in Texas, also with,
Roosevelt’s writings about African American soldiers during the Spanish American War and all these types of things, and for rolls about support of um, of seven states that did not prosecute against lynching.
So by the time Woodrow Wilson was running for President Trotter and in that part of the book, other black Northerners like two boys, were weary of the GOP.
And we’re really arguing that black people need to vote locally, at least for, um, those who supported black civil rights. And if that was not Republicans, they should vote Democrat or if it was, you know, a worker, men’s party or whatever party had you.
So by the time Woodrow Wilson was running for president, Wilson himself.

[54:44] Accepted overtures from African Americans in New Jersey who approached him, his governor, and praised him initially because Woodrow Wilson was involved in preventing a lynching that was about to rise in New Jersey in 1910.
So he had kind of a support of local black support, which is funny. Now you kind of look at his his statements about African American people. But that was that was him you have to think of in the time.

Jake Interview:
[55:10] You think of the spectrum of what white people were doing in general and maybe didn’t seem so bad against that background?

Kerri Interview:
[55:15] Yes, and against that background, Exactly. And so Woodrow Wilson Trotter and his league approach Wilson and actually met with him.
And to give an idea of how revolutionary that was seen at the time, what Wilson was actually threatened by Southern Democrats for agreeing to meet with with black Northerners so.

Jake Interview:
[55:32] Yeah, that was gonna be my next question was, how typical would it have been for a presidential candidate to meet with members of the black community at that time?

Kerri Interview:
[55:41] It’s not that it didn’t happen. Is that in when Trotter met with a Roosevelt, he’s meeting with him as a representative and often all black group.
So he was coming in and saying, We are Black River people. We want to meet with you and Woodrow Wilson, unlike everybody else who kind of just ignore him, says OK and has the meet with him.
Um, they meet with him, and Woodrow Wilson basically says, Well, I you know, I don’t know what I can do for, um, race relations, but I will.
I will do my best to be fair and in the context of 1912 1916.
That was a pretty bold statement to say, because this was at a time when most Republicans and all Democrats were arguing that, you know, racial segregation was not harmful.
Racial discrimination disfranchised mint were not problems, So Trotter rallied for the first time in only time in his life.
He supported publicly support a presidential candidate he had.

[56:38] He urged black northerners who were considered a swing vote at the time to rally around Woodrow Wilson and Woodrow Wilson won the presidency, and he won by,
margins in northern States where the Democrats had not won,
national elections in year.
So, um Trotter than takes that as a sign that the black community should confront and hold the Wilson administration responsible because they were responsible getting Wilson elected in the North. And so when. Woodrow Wilson.
Almost immediately when he entered office in March 1913 when Woodrow Wilson.

[57:19] Immediately segregates the federal government was running the first things he did within three weeks of taking office, Um, and also Woodrow Wilson appointed avowed white supremacists and,
ah, white Southerners who approved of lynching to his Cabinet.
Um, Trotter goes and confronts him in his office twice, And I argue in the book that the significance of this was much more than merely, um, you know, get in some press out of it.
Um, Trotter really mobilized and galvanised a generation of black people,
who, um, we’re not used to seeing African American people boldly confront elected officials about their dismal racial policy. Right?
I gave a talk a couple of weeks ago and somebody asked, Well, that seems pretty amazing now because you don’t even see that now, with a group of people showing up in confronting elected official.
They remind the president, United States, and saying, This is your record on this. And this is how it has affected us.
And what is what? Why are you How do you answer that, right?
Um, and when he did that, that really gave him a level of celebrity amongst working class black Northern northerners and respect across the African diaspora.
Because it was the first time anyone had done that. And for, you know, I would argue during that time was the only time somebody had approached the president on his racial record in that way.

Jake Interview:
[58:48] So it sounds like Trotter than uses the fame of the notoriety he gains for those confrontations tell build a new national race Congress.
And then he uses that group to put pressure on Wilson’s reelection campaign. What what were they asking for in the 1916 election?

Kerri Interview:
[59:09] The Liberty League is eventually called themselves, were really arguing that, um, again for the 13th 14th and 15th Amendment to be supported, but specifically for some type of federal anti lynching legislation.
Um, because lynching, despite sort of declining slightly in the early 19 hundreds, was on the rise in the error of World War One.
And so their argument was that particularly as the Europe devolved war in the United States is remaining neutral,
that this was a time to completely remake what kind of democracy in the world would look like, Um, and that in addition to self determination for, um, you know, those in Eastern Europe,
in the beginning of World War, that African American communities need self determination through the vote and also through federal protection against lynching and racial violence.
Um, although, of course, Woodrow Wilson, um, did not sort of heed that call.
And Wilson actually was was, you know, a big supporter off D.
W. Griffith’s film, The Birth of a Nation, which came out in 1915 and Trotters argument was basically that, um.

[1:00:21] That film encapsulated kind of what life was like for African Americans during the Wilson years and that,
he and his literally little liberty Lee argued that in order seek true racial freedom but also racial justice.
Waas for, um, legislation, but also for organizing African American people across the diaspora.

Jake Interview:
[1:00:45] And I’ll just pause to shamelessly plug one of our past episodes for our listeners who haven’t heard it to check out Episode 1 21 which is all about trotters Fight against Birth of a Nation in Boston.
So shameless plug on my part after the shameless plug will also give a fair warning to our listeners that there’s gonna be a lot of sad and disappointing news about the life of Monroe Trotter from here on out.

Kerri Interview:
[1:00:58] Yes, no problem.

Jake Interview:
[1:01:12] Because it sounds like the 1916 campaign and the Liberty League are kind of the the high point of trotters influences popularity, sort of his national reach.
The Guardian is hitting hard times at this at this point, what do you think was going wrong and why was Trotter personally enjoying more success than the paper at that point?

Kerri Interview:
[1:01:34] Um well, I would say that the 19 time you get to World War One,
there is definitely a shift in the notion that newspapers, particularly black newspapers in orderto get the type of audiences that would keep a paper live, had to be more than what The Guardian waas. Which the guardian waas?
Um, local. It was satirical. Asti boys would say it was fiercely political.
Um, people who read it loved it and people talked about it, and it was good at stirring up conversation and rallying people politically.
But it was not, you know, like the Chicago Defender, which had, you know, short stories and photographs in it and, you know, cartoons and that type of thing. Although Trotter did have cartoons, they were not, you know, playful cartoons that were, you know, political, um, cartoons against his enemy.

[1:02:23] And so, by the 19 teens in 19 twenties, as I say in the book, the political, the political culture of newspapers had fundamentally changed, and he did not change with those things.
So that was one of the problems. The other problem was that even though his personality, his his confrontations made him somebody who waas difficult to get along with and never became a movement person.
All the things that Trotter argued for eventually became mainstream civil rights arguments by the 1920 twenties.
So and that federal anti lynching dough, the dire anti lynching bill submitted in 19 twenties with help from Trotter that became kind of mainstream, accepted by white reformers.
His notion that the 13th 14th and 15th Amendment had to be enforced that became, by, you know, the 19 twenties.
The rhetoric of the n double a CP. The notion that black people needed to be, have a say in how it was that they became free.
That became, you know, the rhetoric of of Black, both black nationalists and the rising sort of black eso socialist movement in New York City.
So everything that he argued for eventually became mainstream, which is kind of the tragedy in the triumph of his life.
The public end activists eventually came around to what Trotter was saying.

[1:03:43] Trotter himself, however, was definitely at the vanguard of that, and so at his time, he was not recognized as changing the landscape as much as he actually Waas.

Jake Interview:
[1:03:55] As we get into the teens. Monroe Trotter had a series of health problems that you diagnosed as being psychosomatic. What do you think was going wrong with him? Uh, sort of. 1915 1916.

Kerri Interview:
[1:04:08] Well, yeah, I say in the book that I would say, um, I’m not a doctor, so I couldn’t say, you know, that there’s nothing wrong with him. I would say that throughout his life, he and particularly turns the end of his life. He had all of these ailments.
I’m the develops. One of them is he gets like, a boil on the side of his neck That has to be lanced. He suffered the time that a child has suffered from lung problems and breathing problems.
Um, and you born prematurely, but not the Mets.
Throughout his life, he was definitely seen as somebody who waas very, very moody.
Um, and somebody who often at these moments would have, um, you know, physical ailments.
Um, that when you’re reading the historical record, it’s like, Is this a real thing or is it not a real thing or what’s what’s actually going on?
And then suddenly she just like boats back out of it and be his his old self and so part of the source of what I argue.
The book, the source of some of his, um his, you know, inner torm turmoil was that the paper was was not making money.
Um, in 1918 his wife, Dini, died of the Spanish flu or the epidemic of 1918 and she was not expected to die.
So she was actually came down with the flu. He checks in with her. She says she’s doing fine. He goes to give a speech in Chicago on the train. On the way back, he finds up from somebody else that she died. So very dramatic moment.

[1:05:35] She basically ran. The newspapers are now he’s alone, running newspaper. And also he never had any Children.
Um, I think he entered a period of his life, Um, again, based on the historical record where that isolation or his career is very isolating.
Um, So he wasn’t into boys who had kids and a wife and like a community. Although he had all these supporters on dso by the 19 twenties.
Um, even though his rhetoric and his politics were really taken up by younger activists in Harlem and New York and Jamaica and the Caribbean, he really waas,
considered somebody who waas like a relic of the past.
Um and, um not somebody who a lot of people were close to.

Jake Interview:
[1:06:25] I’m just gonna back up to something you glanced over because I’ve been for very obvious reasons, thinking a lot about the 1918 flu recently.

Kerri Interview:
[1:06:32] Yes, Yes, yes, I guess. Yes.

Jake Interview:
[1:06:33] Yeah, and I walk in the Fairview Cemetery is just very close to my house. So I walk in the cemetery sometimes, and I Look, I’ve just really been taking stock of all the 1918 inscriptions recently, which Deeney is is one.
What was she doing at the time? She got exposed to the fluid. What sort of work was she doing that letter in tow? That exposure.

Kerri Interview:
[1:06:54] So one of the things that I delighted in when I was doing the center of the book was finding out more about her life, trying to find out more about her life independently of Monroe.
So even though trotters rhetoric was that Dini was like his help meet and she was running the paper, there’s actually evidence that by 1907 Dini should have had her own public career in service a time of her death.
She was at the pinnacle of that because she was working for the Soldiers Comfort Home, which was making.

[1:07:26] Baskets and UM, providing pen pals and providing support for both soldiers and for civilians who were stationed,
in, um, Air Massachusetts at the the military base there, but also people who were suffering from the flu.
And so she service both or helped both black and white soldiers.
But she was particularly concerned with young black soldiers who were sent to train in Massachusetts, and this was their first introduction to Boston. So she was actually exposed to the disease because she made all these gift backs.
Baskets went up to air from Boston to personally hand give them to young people um she also,
before her death, was very much involved in overturning the conviction of a black man who was accused of murder in the 18 seventies.

[1:08:16] And personally corresponding with the governor various governors to get him released.
So she had shot of her own career, even though she was running the Guardian helping her husband. And so that career, actually is what sadly led to her death. She is exposed to the flu. She came back from air sick.
Um, she was one of the few people who meet immediately seem to recover, Writes tells her husband everyone else of Trotter, that she’s going back out toe work in the community.
And then she fell ill again and died pretty quickly within about two weeks.
So pretty tragic and given our circumstances, you know, the flu in the plant pinned, epic. And, um, you know that for Trotter, he definitely was not.
It was not unexpected death, particularly given that she was it was said that she was recovering.

Jake Interview:
[1:09:07] I was really struck by how quickly Monroe is back to work, and he sees that the really throw himself into his work at that point, although maybe not into the Guardian, fully as it continues its its financial decline.
But he is really taking advantage of what a lot of radical see as the opportunity that the end of the Great War is going to present.
And we spent a fair amount of time in the book discussing this resolution that he and some of the groups is allied with are trying to put before the peace negotiators in Paris.
Will you tell the listeners a little bit about that resolution and then what it took to get Monroe, Trotter to Paris and what Paris was like for him?

Kerri Interview:
[1:09:50] Okay, so he sees part off this this National Liberty leak.
It was organized by he and a radical Caribbean immigrant named Hubert Harrison in,
Harlem, New York, and basically their argument waas,
that the war was not a war that was fighting for, um, liberty of African American people or of the African kind of call nice World, but that the moment was a moment when.

[1:10:19] African Americans and colonized peoples could present their demands before the world, the world.
And he and liberally met in Washington D.
C. To rally, um um, for provision within the Senate Foreign Relations Committee,
that would lead to a decolonization across the world and also make ah, civil rights of of people around the world a priority of,
whenever the war ended with the League of Nations.
Of course, Woodrow Wilson, um, create. So this idea of a new freedom, right? The fact that, um, in Woodrow Wilson’s imagination this would be a new world order.
Um, And at the Paris peace conference, the League of Nations,
was proposed, as as we all know and so trotters idea was that African Americans and African descended people had to be at the table to dismantle, um, Western colonialism,
um and, um, exploitation of colonized people and put the demands, as he said, of the colored people in the United States before the world.

[1:11:30] And at the time the State Department refused to submit, um, passports to African Americans.
Um, because the argument was they were seditious in the way that they were critical of the American policy.
So Onley to African Americans were given an official passport, WB two boys who went on behalf of the N Double A cp to the Pan African Congress, and Robert Moulton, who was the president of Tuskegee.
Um and neither do boys normal, molten addressed, hired the horrendous conditions that black soldiers faced both in the United States and in Europe, or in immediate decolonization of, um, a majority of the world.
And so Trotter and literally decided that Trotter would go and present demands, as he says, the demands of the colored people himself to, um, the Paris Peace Conference.
And to do this, he got, um, he and the Guardian and other newspaper allies had a fundraiser where African Americans could donate money to pay for his travel. Teoh Paris.
Amazingly, um, this was a black effort, so black people from his far away is California and Washington State donated money they managed to pay for his travel.

[1:12:51] Um, But when he goes to get the passport, of course, the State Department will allow him to go on. But he immediately disguised himself as a chef aboard a ship in New York City.
Shaved his mustache off, which, you know, I’m still amazed that actually worked.
And then, I think, then got on the boat and sailed for Paris.
Arrived in Paris just when the peace, um, the recite conference was ending but managed to get the demands put into the your European newspapers.
So, um, actually trotters demands and demands of the colored people, as it was called war featured in French newspapers and English newspapers, Right?
And for the For some of the first time, Europeans and the Allies began to see.

[1:13:39] How much Woodrow Wilson’s administration waas Um um denigrated and despised by African Americans in the country, which was considered by opening thing too many people in Europe at the time,
and that you know, these demands for decolonisation and for civil rights um, were being demanded by black people in America as well as in the colonized world.
You got to Paris late. Um, he is celebrated by various operatives in Paris, but then he is stuck there.
He couldn’t get back. And so there’s a fundraiser to bring him back from Paris to Boston in 1919 and he became again once a month. It’s again a celebrity amongst working class, genteel pour across the country.

Jake Interview:
[1:14:26] 1919. It’s a pivotal point because we have the red summer made a riot in Roxbury. All these things are having almost simultaneously.
So this is a backlash against anything red in America. In Boston in particular.
Well, that doesn’t faze Trotter. What does that mean for Trotter? It is radicals. How are they continuing forward in the face of this backlash?

Kerri Interview:
[1:14:49] He and his supporters, and they included a network of mostly care being born radicals in both New England and New York.
Um, they really saw this as a moment when given the, um, the failed promises of mayday and labour reform and the violence of Red Summer.
This is an opportunity for them to mobilize people,
and to ally themselves with new ways of looking at the world, whether that was, you know, socialism or whether that was communism or whatever it looked like that this was a a chance to galvanize that.
So Trotter became a mentor to a Philip Randolph who was organizing the sleeping car porters down in New York City.
He became again allied with various care being Mladic radicals like Cyril Briggs, and he became somebody who his,
it with in contact with those younger radicals began to argue that, um, using arms of self defense,
was the best way for black community to defend themselves against the rising tide of of violence that was a trick occurring in the aftermath of World War One.
And so, by 1920 when, um.

[1:16:12] The the beginning, the 19 twenties Trotter was somebody who really began to see that black struggle for civil rights in the United States the 13th 14th and 15th Amendment,
that those were still the goals, but that the way to get those goals was through, um, um,
self protection for the African American community and also, through a combination of, you know, Gharbi, ism, socialism.
Um, and, uh, you know, marches, political thought at the time.
By 1921 about early twenties, he found something called the African Blood Brother Heard, which was a secret organization that, um,
basically called upon black communities to arm themselves against racial violence that was occurring at the time the Tulsa race riots in particular in 1921.
Um, he called for, um, a strengthening of labour reform and, ah, transformation of kind of labor in Boston and across the across the country.
Um, and he continued to kind of argue against, you know, the repression of, um, black workers in tenant farmers across the South.

Jake Interview:
[1:17:27] And it keeps pushing for the dire anti lynching bill.

Kerri Interview:
[1:17:30] Yes, the deregulation bill, which which failed, but, um, in there in a despite failing, the dire bill really changed the conversation about, um,
Lynch in the United States until recently had never passed any form of anti lynching, anti mob violence, Um, national legislation.
And, um, the dire bill was the first to go before the House and the Senate and toe have support, um,
of a large minority of of, um, legislators, Right.
So, in other words, it kind of pushed the conversation towards, um, lynching being black people’s fault.
Right? Which was kind of the rhetoric of the time to lynching being something that waas, um, illegal and should be and should be dealt with.
Of course, the bill itself did not pass, but by the 19 twenties, the idea that lynching was just, you know, something that was normal,
by the 19 twenties in other parts of the country outside the south.
Um, you know, legend was was frowned upon.

Jake Interview:
[1:18:41] From a 2020 lens. It’s hard to imagine that a wide swath of the country at one point just believe that because black people were had these rapacious, animalistic appetites, that lynching was just a a normal,
everyday response to that.

Kerri Interview:
[1:18:58] Yes, right? Um, yeah. I mean, and for evaluating trotters career. I mean, he was from the beginning from the 18 nineties saying, along with Ida B. Wells, right? Lynching is a crime.
Um, it, um, is used to terrorize the black community.
It occurred much more often than people at the time. Or some people now would like to admit that it occurred, Um, and that,
there was an easy way to combat it, which was, um, using a federal law against those types of crimes and prosecuting,
towns and cities that failed to protect people who were accused of a crime.
So that was pretty. That was one of the evolved trotters movements.
That was the one that by the time he died in 1934 that became the rhetoric of people who were both parties who were against lynching.
Whereas 1901 You couldn’t really say that your average person, even in Boston, believes that number one mission was a problem. Number two, if it was a problem that you know, it was a crime.

Jake Interview:
[1:20:02] So in this period, sort of from his return from Paris through the ultimate failure of the anti lynching Bill,
Trotter is becoming more and more of a radical, embracing at least the the rhetoric around using arms for black self defense.
Reacting very much to this wave, this reactionary wave that starts in 1919 but personally right.
He’s becoming through the same period, much more pessimistic. And you say that observers would note that he’s disheveled. He’s becoming more withdrawn from polite society.
What’s happening to his mindset, do you think after the defeat of the Dire Bell?

Kerri Interview:
[1:20:43] Again because you didn’t keep a diary. It’s kind of hard toe definitively say, But I proposed in the book that, given the evidence that we have the death of Dini, his mother died in 1918 as well.
Um, he’s basically broke. So he will spend the rest of his life living and boarding with supporters as opposed to being in his own house.
Um, that in and of itself was a strained.
The other thing that was really disappointed. Trotter was that, um, seeing how, despite the fact that the consciousness of African American people had shifted,
um, that lynching was still a problem, right?
Black people were still disenfranchised. And not only that, he started to see, um um,
a lot of that virulent racism a rise in Boston when it hadn’t arisen in the same way before.
So, um, Boston was segregated? Yes. Did black people have the same economic opportunities in terms of jobs?
No. But Boston, um, given its history.

[1:21:51] Had a period from roughly 18 80 to 1920 where, um,
even the most conservative of conservative white person in Massachusetts would say, you know, segregation is not good, and so we’re gonna pass this an anti segregation along with Massachusetts did.
It was on the first states to do so after the Civil War.
Um, by 1920 there was a shift generally in the culture, but also in Boston generally were that old guard kind of reform neo abolitionist crowd.

[1:22:21] Died out or became less concerned about civil rights.
And so what you’re left with was really a lot of lip service in New England to, um, the liberal past.

[1:22:35] Also at the same time, um, lack of support for civil rights measures locally, even though Massachusetts politicians were very critical of the South and racism on a national scale.
So, for instance, Boston, By the 19 twenties, there’s a national resurgence of the clan, and New England had a resurgence of the clan.
Um, by the end of the 19 twenties, the Boston City Hospital was still segregated. It’s nurses Training school, which was one of the best in the country, would not admit African American nurses to be trained.
And the response to this even by people who were supposedly allies of the black community, was that well, you know, we didn’t really know what was segregated.
Um, you know, it’s really segregated because black and white people don’t get along.
You know, that type of rhetoric, Um, you also had, by the 19 twenties and new crop of less radical leaders, arise in Boston, who really began to argue that what Boston needed.

[1:23:39] To get rid of racial inequity Waas you know, the Urban League or a spread of the the end.
Apple, a CP and Trotter, given his background, didn’t believe that those things were speaking to the people.
He really believe that those were, um, organizations, however valid that we’re not, you know, mobilizing your average person on and then he really was, you know, became very bleak with the onset of the, um, the Great Depression.
So, Massachusetts, we we often miss that Massachusetts and the Great Depression had, um, suffered and was one of the states.
It’s the Northern States in particular. Suffered the most in terms of losing jobs and and losing access to, um, to what had been, you know, a 40 year run of never take, you know, economic expansion across the Bay State.
And so this was devastating for the black community. It was, um, doubly devastating. So black businesses, you know, disappeared never came back.
Um, you had a rise in homelessness within the black community, hunger, all those types of things that was even worse than what was occurring in the white community across the city.
And, um, with that, he really, um you know, he started to see How did this level of despair that many people were seeing in the in the depression.

[1:25:02] He had once been allied with James Michael Curley, the famous man mayor, um, he had a falling out with Curly over Curly’s visual policies, but he was also disappointed that curly, um waas slow to, um.

[1:25:16] Um get Massachusetts allied with the New Deal programming that began.
Um, O. R. Was talked about when Roosevelt was running for president for the first time, So try had a lot to be disillusioned about.
One things he discovered was this rise in segregation across Massachusetts.
Locally, there was whites deciding, like in towns or in banks, that they were going to have segregation.
His policy, and they’re not being the same type of legislative response has had a cure before on basically Massachusetts argument.
Being much like many Masters, liberals could argue now where we might have racial issues, but they aren’t as bad as the rest of the country.
So you know we don’t need to fix them. And so really, that was a shift in trotters experience with the city and with New England.
Um, and he began to really despair the fact that it appeared as though, um you know, as much as things had changed, they hadn’t changed in the way that he would have suspected.

Jake Interview:
[1:26:20] It’s dedicated. Ah, life is fortune, this good name to this cause. And maybe it hasn’t moved as far as he’d like it to.

Jake Punch In:
[1:26:29] Hey, listeners, this is Jacob. The future from the editing room.
Over the next few minutes, you’re gonna hear Carry. And I both reference Dini a few times when in fact, we should be speaking of Maud Monroe Trotter. Sister Maud Charter. Sorry about that.

Jake Interview:
[1:26:47] Says It seems like just a decade from sort of the mid twenties of,
professional setbacks, personal tragedies, political defeats, everything is going wrong from the mid twenties to mid thirties.
At some point, we have to discuss April 7th 1934 trotters 62nd birthday Every other profile that I’ve read of William Monroe.
Trotter treats his death as this big, unsolved mystery. Lot of speculation about what might have happened, but when I read your treatment, it seems like you you’ve made up your mind what happened.

Kerri Interview:
[1:27:25] Yeah, and I will, I will say, um based on all of the newspaper evidence evidence at the time, the writings between his family members, Dini in particular and, um, the newspapers when he died.
And, um, the medical report that came out when he was picked up.
Um, there is ample evidence that he jumped from the roof.

Jake Interview:
[1:27:52] What were the circumstances of his death for folks who haven’t read?

Kerri Interview:
[1:27:55] So the circumstances of his death for that April 7 1934 was his 62nd birthday right before this happened throughout 1933.
He was sick. So he suffered from a, um a very painful cysts that again drew on his neck.
Um, he moved into a, um, apartment,
of one of his supporters where he shared, um, roughly, you know, to be 1500 square feet with the mother, her grown son, and various people who lived in the house.
So he’s in his sixties. He’s living, basically, as with roommates at the time his mother is dead.
Both of his sisters have lives of their own.
Um And then there’s thescore Sbarro case in Alabama, which he valleys around supporting the vilification of Scottsboro boys.
But that that was really seen as this watershed moment of Will those young men be freed or will they not be freed? So all of this is happening at the same time.
And then in early 1934 he gets word that the newspaper.

[1:29:05] Is so in such dire straits that it cannot be printed right that the all the printers he’s used in the past and he’s like has all these iron use and debts that he pays them.
They refused to get it printed on DSO. The paper itself is collapsing. It actually did not.
It appeared, but then it didn’t here and it was like a rerun of other papers. It’s basically collapsed and he’s told, Ah, week before he dies that the guardian is basically over.

[1:29:32] And so it goes back to this apartment where he’s staying still very sick and also having symptoms as people who were around him with a test of, you know, wandering not being able to sleep, seeming very confused.

[1:29:47] Writing a lot of his friends who he had known for years start to write him letters urging him, you know, toe cheer up, basically realized that he’s despondent on. He doesn’t respond to them.
His sister a couple of days before Crowder’s birthday manages to save the Guardian, and I’m still not.
There is no all the research that I did.
There is no evidence that it happened, but she agreed to pay another printer on DSO. The paper would be able to appear on DSO. Mod actually goes and tells him that the paper will appear.
He goes toe mods house to go over the proofs on that Friday night, and his sister and her husband basically note that he seemed very disoriented, despondent, very sad.
At one point he gets up, got up to go to another room, and he hit his head very dramatically on a on a stove, and basically I was very disoriented, so they sent him back to his room. He goes to sleep.
The, um, members of the house. He’s in the Gibsons. Check on him periodically. Which is a sign that, you know, they were concerned about his welfare andan early in the morning, he gets up in the sun, in the house, Here’s and get up.
Um, sees, like his shadow go up the steps, assumes that he’s, you know, fine, because he’s made it to the night.
And then they hear the side and he fell.

[1:31:14] He fell or he was He was in the snow on the ground when they got there. He’s picked up by the ambulance taken to the hospital, and the hospital would rule that he, um he jumped right?
And that he was actually the medical examiner would say he was actually alive when they got and got him, and he was just, you know, in tears and not wanting to be saved.
So So, um, um, a lot of evidence that it was a suicide.
Um, I think just on that point I would say that you know what I wrote the book. I fully expect, You know, people say no.
Why would you say he killed himself is not killings up. I think the resistance to talking about that is kind of the, um, resistance that people have to discussing.
Got a mental illness or the effects of how activism can weigh people down, particularly if you have a long life of activism.
Um, you know, third over 30 years, he’s easy at protests and he’s getting arrested. And he’s, you know, write letters. And he’s being with Congress people. And he’s organizing marches. I mean that. So that’s a long career to exist in.
And so I think there’s for many people there still shame surrounding suicide or mental health issues.

[1:32:30] And so I think it, um the denial of what actually happened began right around his death. So the black press immediately reported on it.
Um, and you know, there’s telegrams. Oh, my goodness. Trotter killed himself that the rhetoric and then Dini, his sister basically went to the press and basically said it wasn’t true that he didn’t kill himself in.
This was actually after she signed the death certificate that said he did kill himself.
But her public rhetoric was that Oh, no, no. He accidentally fell.
Um, he was snowy. He misses footing, and he fell.
And so that then became the narrative that particularly his sister wanted to preserve, which is understandable when when somebody,
takes their own life, often the family can have a very ah reaction that they want to protect the person’s privacy and protect the person’s identity.

Jake Interview:
[1:33:27] And I would say that that effort was a fairly successful. She seems to have muddied the waters well enough that a lot of later writers treat what happened as being unsure.

Kerri Interview:
[1:33:37] Yes. Oh, yes.

Jake Interview:
[1:33:38] And part of the reason she has that ability to sort of curate his memory is because she goes on publishing the Guardian for, uh, how long would you keep publishing the Guardian?

Kerri Interview:
[1:33:49] She dies in the late 1950. So she publish it up until at least 1957. Last, um, addition, I found, was 1957.
However, her her husband, Doc Stewart, continued to release issues of the Guardian that we’re still card the Guardian.
But they weren’t like weekly. They would come out, you know, sporadically when he dies, he then left the remnants of the guardian slash the remnants of the black newspaper of the city to young people who were founding what became the Bay State banner.
So, um, the, um effort by Dean by his sister MoD and his brother in law to keep the garden going Teoh really protect Monroe’s,
reputation.
They thought, because, of course, they saw suicide is being, you know, taking away from his reputation. Although we’d be hopefully like that.
That’s not true narratives, right? And so, um, he they definitely were involved in sowing seeds of doubt that he had committed suicide within the community.

Jake Interview:
[1:34:58] At the moment of his his death. What was his? I guess his public image is his persona. How is he remembered by the black community at at the time of his death? What were the tributes like of the eulogies?
How was he remembered at the time?

Kerri Interview:
[1:35:14] Well, I always When When people ask this on the book stuff, I always point Teoh quotes by everyone from Marcus Garvey, who was in London at the time.
Teoh Kelly Miller, who was a black conservative, was no friend of trotters to do.
Boys is toe all these people writing in and saying that. Trotter waas um waas a Nikon right guard Marcus Garvey said that he was the most radical Negro that Garvey had ever met.

Jake Interview:
[1:35:43] Which is something coming from Marcus Garvey.

Kerri Interview:
[1:35:44] Yes, exactly, Cyril Cyril Briggs, who was a um, a leader in the African Black Brotherhood, said that he was the most the stormy petrel of the time.
This is what he calls called him. He basically said, you know, younger activists owed their activism to him.
A Philip Randolph again would say that Angel of Randolph always said that although he was a fan of Du Bois as a young person, do boys he found to be snobby,
trotter, he found to be somebody who talked to people and who was really passionate and sincere.
His death was covered in the Bahama, in newspapers in the Bahamas, in Jamaica, in Barbados, in,
um, the Scotia. And so he Billy, there’s really this was this outpouring of response and his funeral was actually attended by,
hundreds of people, mostly black, but also white across Boston,
who went to see his is his two attendants union and to watch his burial.
So that, in of itself, is a testament to his legacy amongst a population, a generation of people.

Jake Interview:
[1:36:52] That might be a good place to leave it. So what was his funeral procession or funeral and funeral procession like?

Kerri Interview:
[1:37:00] So they actually, um um was held at the ah, 12th Baptist Church.
Um, the lines were went around the block.
Um, the city itself sent in a guard to guard the casket as it me. Is it me? It’s way down the street.
Um, the most popular newspapers in Boston covered his funeral, which was, you know, unheard of for a civilian. Never mind on African American civilian at the time.
Um and, ah, tributes came in from, um do boys in particular.
Du Bois was getting ready to publish on article in the Crisis magazine about, um, peace negotiations in the Middle East. So he was really following. It was like this, this big story.
And he got the telegram that Trotter had died and immediately ordered that the cover of the crisis have a picture of Trotter. So this is somebody who, you know, they were at odds for most of their lives.
Hey, then ended up and ended up celebrating him and gave a beautiful tribute in which he, um you know, talked about his difficulties but also said argued, Boies argued that he basically changed the way,
black people approached themselves in a approach politics.

Jake Interview:
[1:38:21] Do you think? For folks who read the book or listen to this interview and look back on the life and times of William and wrote Trotter, are there lessons to take for our current era?

Kerri Interview:
[1:38:33] Yeah, I think one of the big things to take, um is that change to racial and economically and politically unjust systems?
Um, take a long time.
That sounds like it would be an evident. And it sounds like I mean procedures.
But I think that’s one of the things I would take that it’s a constant struggle on that, um,
seats of power never concede unless they’re constantly agitated and that things that, um, with agitation and with radicalism often, um.

[1:39:08] It takes constantly agitating for them for things to change.
I would also say that I think the most relevant for our time is trotters dedication to the idea that the press or the media as you now comment call it.
I need to be, um, independent of any political party, any agenda, and that it really needed to be exposing the truth, that that was the role of the press,
that it wasn’t Teoh, you know, curry favor with anybody.
It was to say, You know, something is going on. We’re going to pour report on as factually as possible.
And if you know people are saying the facts are not correct, we will use fax to dispel their misinformation.
So I definitely think that is that is relevant for today. And I also think it’s development.
Kind of looking at Trotter’s life asks us to examine how it is that black protests and civil rights looks differently in different contexts.
So I say in the book, you know, Massachusetts never have lynching it never had I had a liberal reputation, which at the time, of course, was well deserved.
And yet racial inequity and racial discrimination was rampant.
And so therefore, trotters approach look different in fighting white supremacy.
But it didn’t mean that white supremacy didn’t exist in the Commonwealth.

Jake Interview:
[1:40:33] Well, if people want toe, learn more about this topic or if they want to follow you, where should they look?

Kerri Interview:
[1:40:39] I’m I was said by the book. I tried to make it as much. It’s a very I’m I always Joeckel people. I’m like a mass whole at heart. So it has a lot of has a lot of It’s a Boston book is very much about Boston in the city.
Um Yep. Um, I given Corona virus a lot of speaking stuff I was gonna do are cancelled Buck in August.
I am speaking at the the Edith Wharton House in Lenox where they’re having, you know, they do a good job of sort of outlining books that are of local and historical significance.
So I will be there. And that’s the week of August 10th in August 11th.
And then I’m on. I’m on Twitter at, uh, Greenwich carry.
Um and, um, you know, I’ll have more stuff in there as well.

Jake Interview:
[1:41:25] We’ll carry Greenwich. I just want to say thank you very much for joining us today. I’ve really appreciated the conversation.

Kerri Interview:
[1:41:29] Well, thank you so much. It was a pleasure. And thank you for I really I’m my background before it became a stocky academic was in public history.
So I’m somebody who really I love when people do couple of history and, you know, um, presented to people who are not academics, but we’re passionate and interested in history, so thank you.

Jake Interview:
[1:41:47] Oh, thanks.

Jake Intro And Outro:
[1:41:49] To learn more about the life and times of William and wrote Trotter, check out this week’s show notes at hub history dot com slash 183 We’ll have a link to purchase the book Black Radical by Carrie Greenwich, as well as a link to her Twitter.
We’ll also linked to our earlier episodes about Monroe charters Fight against the movie Birth of a Nation, my interview with Millington Burgers and Lockwood, where we discuss Monroe’s father, James Trotter, and some other classic episodes that are related to the conversation.
And, of course, we’ll have a link to information about our upcoming Boston history. Happy Hour.
If you’d like to get in touch with us, you can email us at podcasting hub history dot com.
We’re hub history on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.
Or you can go toe hub history dot com and click on the Contact US link while you’re on the site, hit the subscribe link and be sure that you never miss an episode.
If you subscribe on Apple podcasts, please consider writing a separate for view. If you do drop us a line and we’ll send you a hub history sticker is a token of appreciation.

Music

Jake Intro And Outro:
[1:42:51] That’s all for now. Stay safe out there, listeners.