THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER25, 2019 79
paper never compromised, which was
part of the reason that it, too, failed.
Some black-owned papers took what-
ever advertising came their way, but
Trotter, true to his abstinence roots, re-
fused to advertise alcohol. He also turned
down ads for skin-whitening products
and hair straighteners, which he felt
dishonored his race. The paper’s popu-
larity might have made that fastidious-
ness tenable, but Trotter did not always
go after subscriber fees, either, as evi-
denced by a letter that the Ohio nov-
elist Charles W. Chesnutt once wrote
to thank Trotter for keeping him on the
mailing list even though he could not
afford the full cost of a subscription.
Trotter was more generous with his
poor allies than with his élite peers.
Old Mon, as he came to be known,
spent his twilight not in Cambridge
but with socialists, anti-imperialists,
and the youth radicals of Roxbury.
While the N.A.A.C.P. declined, at first,
to work with Communists to defend
the nine Scottsboro Boys falsely ac-
cused of raping two white women in
Alabama, Trotter wrote letters on their
behalf, and gave their case top billing
in the Guardian. That solidarity with
the marginalized and the poor, despite
his privileged background, is part of
what makes Trotter so appealing. “All
that is of significance in my personal
history,” he once wrote, “has been in
connection with the contest against
color-line discriminations.”
However significant those contri-
butions may have been, they cost him
greatly. By 1910, Trotter and his family
had had to sell most of their invest-
ment properties to support the news-
paper, and that year he and his wife
had to leave their house in Dorchester.
He and Geraldine never had children;
she kept the books for the Guardian,
and was devoted to charitable causes.
It was her charity work that took her
to Camp Devens, where she visited
black soldiers and likely caught the flu
that killed her during the epidemic of
- Sixteen years later, when Trotter
died, Du Bois contributed a remem-
brance of him to the N.A.A.C.P. mag-
azine, acknowledging their philosoph-
ical and tactical differences but also
paying tribute to Trotter’s foresight. For
the cause of racial justice, Du Bois
wrote, “not one but a thousand lives,
like that of Monroe Trotter, is neces-
sary to victory.”
Trotter did not live to see such a vic-
tory, and he was, apparently, never satis-
fied with his accomplishments. “Black
Radical” opens on the morning of Trot-
ter’s sixty-second birthday, with him
standing on the roof of the boarding
house in Roxbury where he lived after
selling his marital home, surveying the
city that he had failed to change. Then
he jumped. Others, contending with
this shocking death, have made much
of Trotter’s dizzy spells, his tendency to
pace on that roof, and the drainpipe
that he seems to have grabbed on his
way down—evidence that perhaps, as
his two surviving sisters insisted, the fall
was accidental. But Greenidge presents
it as a suicide, a reaction to his strug-
gling finances and also those of thenewspaper, and to the accumulating fail-
ures of his activism. Intentional or not,
it was a tragic death for so courageous
a life—but the real tragedy, Greenidge
argues, is not that Trotter failed “but
that the people whose rights he so pas-
sionately aligned with his own interests
could so callously forget him.”
Yet not everyone forgot. In the ac-
knowledgments of “Black Radical,”
Greenidge describes how she first learned
of Trotter from her grandparents, while
at their home in Arlington, Massachu-
setts. They were watching a television
retrospective on the busing crisis, which
led to attacks on black schoolchildren
by the parents of their white peers, and
to the eventual flight of many white
families from Boston. “If Trotter were
alive,” her grandfather said, “none of that
would have happened.” “What really annoys me is that they call it Thanksgiving!”