clear-eyed that vision was. Trotter called
for an anti-lynching bill and for federal
enforcement of the Thirteenth, Four-
teenth, and Fifteenth Amendments—
which, for years, were largely theoreti-
cal propositions—and he insisted that
protest and civil disobedience were the
only effective remedies for racial dis-
crimination. His legacy presents a chal-
lenge to those who seek change today:
is compromise a necessary evil of any
social movement, or is it the original
sin of collective action?
A
descendant of the Hemings fam-
ily at Monticello, William Mon-
roe Trotter was born on April 7, 1872,
near Chillicothe, Ohio, just south of Co-
lumbus. His mother was the great-grand-
daughter of Sally Hemings’s sister, born
free into a mixed-race family only one
generation removed from slavery; his fa-
ther was the child of an enslaved black
woman and her white owner. Trotter’s
parents were married in Ohio, after his
father returned from fighting in the Civil
War with the Massachusetts 55th; even-
tually, the family moved to Boston, where
they raised their son and two daughters.
Black Bostonians, a quarter of the
city’s population today, were a small mi-
nority when the Trotters arrived. Trotter’s
father became the first black employee
of the United States Postal Service, but,
after being passed over for promotions
because of his race, he resigned. Around
the same time, he split with the Repub-
lican Party and joined the emerging
negrowump movement, started by the
pioneering black journalist T. Thomas
Fortune and apparently named by anal-
ogy to the mugwumps—Republicans
who refused to back their party’s nom-
inee in the Presidential election of 1884.
The negrowumps were angry that the
party of Lincoln was not enforcing Re-
construction in the South, and the elder
Trotter was rewarded for his political
independence with an appointment in
the Democrat Grover Cleveland’s Ad-
ministration. As “recorder of deeds,” he
was the highest-paid federal employee
in the nation’s capital, earning forty
thousand dollars in just two years. He
invested much of it in real estate, be-
fore dying in 1892, of tuberculosis, at the
age of fifty.
The younger Trotter inherited his
father’s intellect and politics, along with,
eventually, his wealth. After graduating
as valedictorian and class president from
Hyde Park High School, he enrolled at
Harvard, where he became the first black
member of Phi Beta Kappa. During
college, Trotter was known for getting
around on a bicycle before they were
common. He also led the college’s ab-
stinence club, hosted weekend Bible
studies, and helped to push for an anti-
discrimination law after a white barberin Cambridge refused to cut the hair of
Harvard’s varsity football captain, a black
All-American center and first-year law
student. When the law faculty discour-
aged the student from filing a lawsuit
against the barber, it became clear to
Trotter and his friends that not even
the Talented Tenth would be spared the
humiliations of segregation or the faith-
lessness of ostensible white allies.
After graduating—with a bachelor’s
degree, in 1895, and then a master’s, the
following year—Trotter, who had toyed
with the idea of becoming a minister,
rejected a teaching job at a black school
and spent a year applying for and not
getting the banking and corporate jobs
that he wanted. Meanwhile, his white
peers, some of whom had weaker tran-
scripts and thinner résumés than he did,
were given opportunities more lucra-
tive than the ones he was denied. He
considered moving to Europe, where
he felt he “would be recognized as a
man,” but eventually found the kind of
job he wanted with one of Boston’s most
established real-estate firms. Between
his salary and his commissions, he pros-
pered, and soon broke away to open his
own mortgage business. In 1899, he mar-
ried his childhood friend Geraldine Pin-
dell and bought her a stately home in
Dorchester, one of the oldest neighbor-
hoods in the city. Then he did the most
radical thing he could think of: he started
a newspaper.H
e called it the Guardian. It was not
the first black-owned newspaper
in the United States—that was Free-
dom’s Journal, which began, in New York
City, in 1827, the year that the state offi-
cially abolished slavery. “Too long have
others spoken for us,” its founders de-
clared. By the time that Lincoln signed
the Emancipation Proclamation, more
than twenty other black newspapers
had been launched, including Freder-
ick Douglass’s the North Star, published
in Rochester. These papers were essen-
tial to promoting the abolitionist cause,
allowing free blacks to tell their own
stories and to spread the stories of peo-
ple still living in slavery. Black churches
went into the news business, too: in 1848,
the African Methodist Episcopal Church
started a weekly that is still published
today, as the Christian Recorder.
After the Civil War, literacy rates