78 THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER25, 2019
to drop him. Forbes left the paper not
long after the protest.
Forbes’s departure might not have
been entirely Washington’s fault: al-
most everyone who ever worked di-
rectly with Trotter eventually soured
on him. Du Bois, who had collaborated
and corresponded with Trotter for years,
decided to avoid a conference for the
National Negro-American Political
League, in 1907, on the ground, as he
confided to a mutual friend, that it was
“impossible to work permanently with
Mr. Trotter.” Woodrow Wilson met
with Trotter and other civil-rights lead-
ers in the Oval Office during the fall
of 1914; when the meeting turned ac-
rimonious, the President accused Trot-
ter of having “spoiled the whole cause
for which you came.” Julius Rosenwald,
the president of Sears, Roebuck and
Company, who used some of his for-
tune to champion black causes, called
Trotter a “notoriety seeker, whose meth-
ods are dismaying to the conservative
members of his race.” Yet, for every one
of these élites, there were legions of
working-class readers who admired
what the St. Paul Appeal called Trot-
ter’s “unceasing warfare against in-
justice”: “While the majority of the so-
called leaders have equivocated and
compromised the people for gold or
power, William Monroe Trotter has al-
ways stood as a stone wall against every
form of injustice.”
For Trotter, these untrustworthy “so-
called leaders” eventually included the
N.A.A.C.P., even though he had helped
to found its precursor. In 1905, he had
joined with twenty-eight other anti-
Bookerites to form the Niagara Move-
ment, with the goal of opposing segre-
gation directly. Within a few years, that
national organization had dissolved, and
by 1910 most of its members had been
folded into the N.A.A.C.P.—but not
Trotter, who believed that this new in-
carnation was fatally compromised by
its largely white leadership and its de-
pendence on white financial support.
He had faith only in “an organization of
the colored people and for the colored
people and led by the colored people.”
The perfect is the enemy of the good,
they say, but Trotter believed passion-
ately that the good was the enemy of
the perfect. To his mind, equality could
not come in stages. Rejecting the grad-
ualism of the N.A.A.C.P., he contin-
ued to work with rival organizations.
And he continued to throw himself into
the Guardian, where he could always
have the last word. He used the paper
to endorse Democrats over Republi-
cans, not only in Presidential races but
also in local ward elections, where a
small number of black voters could
swing an outcome. He also focussed
public outrage on cases that the
N.A.A.C.P. was slower to pursue di-
rectly, like that of a young woman
named Jane Bosfield, who was first
denied employment outright at a state
hospital in Medfield, Massachusetts,
and then was allowed to work only if
she agreed to live and eat separately
from her white colleagues.
In 1915, Trotter helped to make
D. W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Na-
tion” a public scandal. Five years earlier,
he had succeeded in stopping a Boston
production of Thomas Dixon’s “The
Clansman,” the play, adapted from Dix-
on’s own novel, which was the basis for
Griffith’s film. Dixon had been a class-
mate of President Wilson at Johns Hop-
kins, which is partly why “The Birth
of a Nation” was screened, notoriously,
at the White House. A thorough ac-
count of Trotter’s crusade appeared in
2014, in Dick Lehr’s “The Birth of a
Nation: How a Legendary Filmmaker
and a Crusading Editor Reignited
America’s Civil War” (Public Affairs),
which formed the basis for a documen-
tary, released in 2017, called “Birth of a
Movement.” The N.A.A.C.P. put its
energies into raising funds for a rivalmovie, to be called “Lincoln’s Dream,”
hoping to answer propaganda with his-
tory. Meanwhile, Trotter organized mass
protests at local theatres, city hall, and
the statehouse.
Greenidge argues that these kinds
of protests, dismissed by many people
at the time as publicity-seeking stunts,
are Trotter’s real legacy. They embold-ened the blacks who took part in them
and embarrassed the whites who op-
posed them, often stripping away rac-
ism’s mask of respectability. Trotter did
not stop “The Birth of a Nation,” but
his tactics were used by the civil-rights
movement to integrate lunch counters,
buses, schools, and other essential spaces.
When legal challenges failed, and even
when they succeeded, direct action
brought the cause to a wider audience,
recruiting more people to the move-
ment and rousing bystanders out of their
indifference. Before it happened with
the footage of fire hoses and police dogs
being used to attack black men, women,
and children in Birmingham, Trotter
made sure people knew it was happen-
ing in the Tremont Theatre, in Boston:
the images of plantation scenes being
staged there, and the news that white
filmgoers had shouted “Kill the darkey!”
at black protesters shamed the moral
descendants of William Lloyd Garri-
son and Wendell Phillips.O
ne of the most satisfying accom-
plishments of “Black Radical” is
the way that Greenidge situates Trot-
ter’s biography in the broader story of
liberal New England. Boston, Greenidge
reminds her readers, incubated the pol-
itics of Malcolm X and of the Rever-
end Martin Luther King, Jr., not to men-
tion the writers Pauline Hopkins and
Dorothy West. Before the Civil War,
Boston was known as a hotbed of ab-
olitionism; after the busing crisis, in the
nineteen-seventies—when white Bos-
tonians worked to prevent the desegre-
gation of the city’s public schools, more
than a century after they were first in-
tegrated by state law—it got tagged as
the most racist big city in America. In
between, black Bostonians, despite never
equalling in number their peers in Phil-
adelphia or New York, advocated for an
exceptionally radical civil-rights agenda.
Trotter rallied that community across
class lines for the cause of black liber-
ation: not just individual improvement
or success but a global fight for free-
dom; not just an end to discrimination
in America but the end of colonialism
in Africa and the Caribbean.
This personal militancy made for a
radical periodical; Trotter was forever
making his own beliefs the basis of the
Guardian’s coverage. Like him, his news-