Last week I showed an undergraduate class a film about William Monroe Trotter. When I asked for reactions, one student asked a question, “Why is Trotter not better known?”
I responded that we don’t do history well, especially African American history. This is true despite the importance of history to our existence and progress.
Who was William Monroe Trotter? He was the son of James Trotter, a hero of the Civil War in the famed 55th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry.
James Trotter moved from Ohio to join the Civil War fight. After the war, he became a man of prominence, eventually being appointed in 1887 by President Grover Cleveland as the second African American to be Recorder of Deeds for the District of Columbia—the first was Frederick Douglas.
James Trotter’s son, William Monroe Trotter, graduated from the Hyde Park High School in Boston, which except for him, was all white. He was valedictorian and president of his high school class. He went to Harvard, finishing with a bachelor’s degree in 1895 and a Master’s degree in 1896, earning Phi Beta Kappa honors, the first person of color to do so at Harvard.
Monroe Trotter was a newspaper editor and real estate businessman in Boston. Importantly he became an activist for African American civil rights, with his newspaper, the Guardian, as his primary weapon.
But Trotter did a lot more than write. He led campaigns against Booker T. Washington and his accommodationist policy, spending time in jail for a small riot against Washington in Boson in 1903.
In 1905, with his friend, W.E.B. DuBois, Trotter led the development of the Niagara Movement, the predecessor of the NAACP. Objecting to its white leadership, Trotter did not join DuBois in the NAACP.
Notably, Trotter met with President Woodrow Wilson at least three times. His second meeting in 1914 was widely covered in the press, making the front page of the New York Times. At that meeting, Trotter complained forcefully about the Wilson administration’s segregationist policies.
Trotter is most known famously for his opposition to the movie, “Birth of a Nation.” He organized and led protest demonstrations in Boston that may have been the first time the country saw protests like the civil rights protests of the 1960s.
In 1915, the same year that Trotter led the demonstrations against “Birth of a Nation,” Carter G. Woodson established the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, which is still going strong today as the Association for the Study of African American Life and History. The next year he founded the Journal of Negro History.
Woodson, who in 1912 was the second African American to earn a Harvard doctorate, initiated Negro History Week in 1926, now Black History Month.
In 1908 Woodson entered the doctoral program at Harvard with the expressed intent to study Negro history. Woodson told one of his proteges that it was at Harvard where he received the inspiration for his life’s work negatively.
While attending a lecture by longtime Harvard professor and renowned American historian Edward Channing, Woodson had listened in amazement when the professor told the class that the Negro had no history. He challenged Channing and argued that no people lacked a history. Channing then told Woodson to prove him wrong.
Woodson later asserted that “if a race has no history, if it has no worthwhile tradition, it becomes a negligible factor in the thought of the world, and it stands in danger of being exterminated.” He believed, and worked to demonstrate, that “The achievements for the Negro properly set forth will crown him as a factor in early human progress and maker of modern civilization.”
Now is an excellent time to have our Black History Month celebrations live up to Woodson’s objectives.
