THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER25, 2019 77
surged, and the black press flourished.
In 1880, there were some thirty black
newspapers in the United States; by
the beginning of the First World War,
there were around three hundred, with
a collective circulation of more than
half a million. Millions of additional
readers availed themselves of second-
hand, thirdhand, and fourth-hand cop-
ies, which they picked up in barber-
shops, diners, and church narthexes.
Some of these papers survive, like the
Philadelphia Tribune and the Chicago
Defender. Others faded over time: the
Elevator, in San Francisco; the Impar-
tial Citizen, in Syracuse; the Mystery,
in Pittsburgh; the Grand Era, in Baton
Rouge. These papers celebrated black
life, covering everything from academic
achievements and musical performances
to marriages, but they also documented
the many injustices that constrained,
denigrated, and imperilled it. As thou-
sands of black men and women went
missing, or were murdered by lynch
mobs, the newspapers helped to pub-
licize dangers, alerting readers to new
Jim Crow laws and sundown towns,
and identifying black-owned businesses
where it was safe to eat or stay while
travelling. They also helped raise funds
for the survivors of racist attacks and
supported investigations into crimes
that local law enforcement had over-
looked—or participated in.
In the years after Reconstruction,
these papers were largely to thank for
making episodes of racial violence causes
célèbres. These included the murder of
the postmaster Frazier Baker and his
two-year-old daughter by a white mob
right outside their South Carolina home,
in 1898, and the dishonorable discharge
of more than a hundred and sixty black
infantrymen by President Theodore
Roosevelt, after they were falsely ac-
cused of murder in Brownsville, Texas,
in 1906. The black press turned these
events into stories, and then turned the
stories into movements to correct mis-
carriages of justice. It was the great era
of muckraking journalism; objectivity
was not a major tenet of most black
papers—or, for that matter, of many
white ones.
It was this opportunity for advocacy
that made newspaper ownership so ap-
pealing to Trotter. As they still some-
times do, New Englanders liked to talk
as if “the Negro problem” afflicted only
the South, but Trotter looked around
his beloved Boston and saw segregation
in the city’s churches, gyms, and hospi-
tals. This “fixed caste of color” meant
that “every colored American would be
a civic outcast, forever alien in public
life,” he wrote; to counter it, he became
involved in the Massachusetts Racial
Protective Association, whose members
included his future business
partner, George W. Forbes.
Forbes was one of Bos-
ton’s first black librarians.
While working at the refer-
ence desk of the public li-
brary’s West End branch, he
had also edited a newspa-
per. After that one folded,
he and Trotter co-founded
the Guardian, and the two
men got an office on Tre-
mont Row, near the Globe and the Her-
ald, in the same building on the same
floor where William Lloyd Garrison
had published the white abolitionist
paper the Liberator. The inaugural issue
of the Guardian appeared on Novem-
ber 9, 1901. It started with four pages
and later grew to eight; it had twenty-
five hundred subscribers, each of whom
paid a dollar-fifty a year for a weekly
copy. Although it was never the largest
or the most widely read of black papers,
Trotter liked to call it “America’s Great-
est Race Paper,” and its motto nicely
encapsulated his own lifelong credo:
“For every right, with all thy might.”T
rotter lived for a fight, and he did
not confine his battles to the pages
of the paper. Like his negrowump fa-
ther, he felt that partisan politics de-
prived black voters of agency; as long
as one party could count on African-
Americans to support it en masse, nei-
ther that party nor any other would feel
the need to take real steps toward ra-
cial justice. Trotter also rejected the con-
servative theory of racial uplift that
called on African-Americans to accept
with patience whatever gradual change
white power brokers thought their con-
stituents could handle. Such accommo-
dationist politics had proliferated since
1881, when the twenty-five-year-old
Booker T. Washington was recruited by
the head of the Hampton Institute, in
Virginia, to go to Alabama to help foundthe Tuskegee Normal School for Col-
ored Teachers. Washington formalized
his incrementalism in an 1895 speech
that became known as the Atlanta com-
promise, in which he argued for a tac-
tical and, as he saw it, lifesaving truce:
African-Americans would cease op-
posing segregation and demanding po-
litical equality in exchange for guar-
anteed access to basic education and
vocational training.
Trotter despised Wash-
ington. He called him “the
Great Traitor” and the “Ben-
edict Arnold of the Negro
race,” and mocked him
whenever he got the oppor-
tunity. When Washington
came to Boston to address
the National Negro Business
League, in 1903, Trotter was
waiting at the A.M.E. Zion
Church to heckle him. Trotter’s fellow-
radicals covered the dais in cayenne pep-
per and laughed as league representa-
tives tried to speak through their sneezes.
When Washington took the stage, Trot-
ter climbed onto a pew and started
shouting questions. The protest became
known as “the Boston riot,” and it got
Trotter arrested—a lucky outcome, in
some ways, since league members had
threatened to throw him out the win-
dow. He was sentenced to thirty days
in jail for disturbing the peace.
Like many later civil-rights activists,
Trotter understood his arrest as strate-
gic. He bet, rightly, that it would gen-
erate headlines and force the white press
to acknowledge the diversity of thought
among black intellectuals: coverage of
the “riot” amounted to column inches
for criticism of the Tuskegee machine.
For his part, Washington gave a state-
ment to the Globe, claiming that “as a
few flies are able to impair the purity
of a jar of cream, so three or four ill-man-
nered young colored men were able to
disturb an otherwise successful meet-
ing.” But that airy public dismissiveness
was belied by Washington’s private ac-
tions. He invested in rival publications
of the Guardian, including the Boston
Colored Citizen and Alexander’s Maga-
zine, which criticized Trotter’s strategy
and attacked him for jeopardizing the
movement. Washington’s supporters
pressured the Guardian’s printer to drop
the paper, and Trotter’s business partner