William Monroe Trotter:Freedom Fighter

William Monroe Trotter, born in 1872, was a civil rights activist who (in my opinion) carried the torch of civil rights after Frederick Douglass passed away in 1895.

Trotter was famous for launching an attack on Booker T. Washington and the Tuskegee Movement. He also was an inspiration for the founding of the NAACP (1896), the owner and editor of The Boston Globe (1901), and was a major leader of The Niagara Movement (1905).

But, in this post I will only focus on two of his most boisterous protests against Black accommodation and White racism...The "Boston Riot" of 1903 and The Birth of a Nation protest marches of 1915.

The Boston Riot

In July of 1903, Booker T. Washington traveled to Boston to speak to the National Negro Business League.  Trotter's plan was to shout out a set of nine prepared questions as Washington spoke.  These questions were basically "calling out" Washington on his status as the so-called spokesman for Black people and for his accommodations/ capitulation to White America in regard to education, voting, civil equality, etc.

As Washington was about to speak, the gathering turned into a small "riot" and as Trotter attempted to shout the provocative questions to Washington he was arrested for disorderly conduct.  He was convicted of the "crime" and spent thirty days in jail as punishment.

Booker T. Washington used many tactics (legal actions against Trotter, economic and vocational pressure against Trotter supporters, sending spies to infiltrate Trotter's organizations, started newspapers to counter Trotter's message, etc.) to try and silence Trotter's "radical" agitation, but Trotter and others (especially W.E.B. DuBois and Ida B. Wells) were undeterred from their quest for equality.

Birth of a Nation Protest

In 1915, William Trotter mobilized the Black Community to protest against the newly released film Birth of a Nation.  This epic silent movie retells the "history" of the Civil War and looks at the person of Reconstruction in the post-Civil War era.  The movie demonized Black people as inferior, lawless, and violent while it glorified the KKK in a re-imagined America where North and South would reconcile to bring back White Power as the answer to all of America's economic and social woes.

Trotter lobbied politicians to ban the movie, but ultimately lost his battle to stop the screening of the controversial movie.  When the film opened in Boston, Trotter and a large crowd of African Americans demanding to purchase tickets, he was punched by a police officer and placed under arrest.  Protests (and violent clashes) continued for months, but was eventually "silenced" as the wave of  Jim Crow segregation and White Power drowned any possibility that America would follow their greatest creed that "All Men Are Created Equal".


Let us not be washed away by capitulation and systematic racism today!

''My vocation has been to wage a crusade against lynching, disenfranchisement, peonage, public segregation, injustice, denial of service in public places for color, in war time and peace''. 

--William Monroe Trotter