THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER25, 2019 75
The motto of Trotter’s newspaper was “For every right, with all thy might.”
BOOKS
UncompromisingWilliam Monroe Trotter and the black radicals of Boston.BY CASEY CEP
ILLUSTRATION BY PAUL ROGERS
T
he mustache had to go. A classic
nineteenth-century handlebar, it
was far too recognizable, so William
Monroe Trotter shaved it off. In addi-
tion to the disguise, he arranged to take
a cooking class in his boarding house,
evincing a sudden interest that would
have surprised his wife, mother, and two
sisters. Then he spent six weeks skulk-
ing around New York, searching for a
ship that would hire him, finally finding
work as a scullion on a small steamer
headed across the Atlantic. Seaman’s pa-
pers carried him as far as Le Havre, where,
to his dismay, the captain informed him
that crew members were not allowed to
disembark, so he devised a ruse that in-
volved delivering a letter to shore. Once
there, having left all his possessions be-
hind and still dressed in his cook’s outfit,
he went looking for a train.
The year was 1919. Trotter was one
of eleven delegates who had been elected
by the National Colored Congress for
World Democracy to carry the concerns
of African-Americans to the Versailles
Peace Conference, only to have Wood-
row Wilson’s Administration deny them
passports. That did not stop Trotter—
not very much stopped Trotter—and,
alone among the eleven, he made his
way to Paris. His subterfuge-filled trav-els took so long that he arrived after the
treaty terms had been dictated to the
Germans, but still in time to try to dic-
tate some terms of his own. He was there
to let “the world know that the negro
race wants full liberty and equality of
rights as the fruit of the world-war.” He
offered the press corps an account of a
recent lynching in Missouri, described
the segregated conditions and the dis-
criminatory treatment of black troops,
and distributed copies of the demands
of the Colored Congress to diplomats
at the conference.
Trotter was already a well-known ad-
vocate for the cause of civil rights, hav-
ing published a weekly newspaper in
Boston for nearly two decades, but his
adventures abroad made him into some-
thing of a folk hero. In “Black Radical:
The Life and Times of William Mon-
roe Trotter” (Liveright), the historian
Kerri K. Greenidge suggests that Trot-
ter’s time in Paris was typical of his ac-
tivism, in that it was simultaneously a
terrific success and a tremendous fail-
ure. On the one hand, dozens of news-
papers carried reports of his presence at
the conference and reproduced the griev-
ances that he brought before the attend-
ees. On the other, his detractors denied,
“fake news” style, that he ever even made
it to France, and none of his demands
were included in the peace treaty. He also
ran out of money so quickly—exhaust-
ing the three thousand dollars he had
received from around the United States
in donations as small as fifty cents—that
he had to wait another two months for
his supporters to raise enough funds to
bring him back home.
Those supporters were, at one time,
legion: few men have had so many friends
to lose, and few have done so as efficiently.
An uncompromising radical, Trotter re-
fused to budge in his beliefs, and that ri-
gidity eventually alienated nearly every-
one in his life, straining his relationships
and draining his finances. He fought not
only white enemies but also would-be
black allies, including Booker T. Wash-
ington and W. E. B. Du Bois. He never
ran for political office, but he was for-
ever primarying the world from the left:
the archive of the newspaper that he ran
testifies to his willingness to attack any-
one who did not share his exact vision
of how to achieve racial justice.
Yet those same pages show just how