Career
Despite his academic achievements, Trotter hit a racial glass ceiling and was frustrated in his efforts to excel in banking. In 1901, along with his friend George Forbes, an Amherst College graduate, Trotter co-founded the Boston Guardian, setting up shop in the same building that had once housed William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator. He was managing editor of The Guardian, which frequently published editorials and letters opposing the conservative accommodationist policies of Booker T. Washington, the well-known founder of Tuskegee Institute. Earlier in 1901, Trotter had founded the Boston Literary and Historical Association, which became a forum for militant political thinkers such as W.E.B. Du Bois and Oswald Garrison Villard. Archibald Grimké was also active with Trotter in the Association and in writing for the paper.
Along with Du Bois, Trotter was a charter member of the Niagara Movement in 1905, an organization of African Americans who renounced the ideas set forth in Booker T. Washington’s "Atlanta Compromise" speech of 1895. Trotter and Du Bois founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909. Trotter left because he did not think that whites should participate as officers of the NAACP. He founded the National Equal Rights League.
Through the Guardian, Trotter mounted a campaign against Thomas Dixon's play The Clansman (1905), including encouraging a protest against it. The play closed. In 1915, when the film adapted from it, Birth of a Nation opened in Boston, Trotter led pickets to demonstrate against the racist film, and the theater ended its run.
In 1912 Trotter helped support the southern Democrat Woodrow Wilson for president, who disappointed his supporters by imposing the re-segregation of workspaces in several federal agencies. As a political activist, Trotter and Grimké led several protests against segregation in the federal government. Trotter and a group of African Americans went to the White House to protest President Wilson’s actions. Offended by Trotter’s manner and tone during their meeting, Wilson banned him from the White House for the remainder of his term in office.
Wilson's administration put obstacles in the way of Trotter and other African Americans who wanted to attend the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 to protest treatment of African Americans in the US, by refusing to issue passports to them. Trotter obtained work as a waiter on the SS Yarmouth to gain passage overseas. While in Paris, Trotter attended the First Pan African Congress.
In 1931 in the pages of The Guardian, Trotter descried the plight of the Scottsboro boys, nine African-American teenagers accused of raping two white woman in Alabama. In their first trial, they were convicted and sentenced to death. They had three trials and were eventually defended by Samuel Liebowitz. Since most blacks had been disfranchised in the former Confederate states since the early 20th century, they could not vote or sit on juries. The case ultimately went to the US Supreme Court as Powell v. Alabama.
On the night of April 7, 1934, William Monroe Trotter died after a fall from the roof of his home in Boston. The cause of death was given as “Unspecified”. It was his 62nd birthday.
Read more about this topic: William Monroe Trotter
Famous quotes containing the word career:
“What exacerbates the strain in the working class is the absence of money to pay for services they need, economic insecurity, poor daycare, and lack of dignity and boredom in each partner’s job. What exacerbates it in upper-middle class is the instability of paid help and the enormous demands of the career system in which both partners become willing believers. But the tug between traditional and egalitarian models of marriage runs from top to bottom of the class ladder.”
—Arlie Hochschild (20th century)
“I restore myself when I’m alone. A career is born in public—talent in privacy.”
—Marilyn Monroe (1926–1962)
““Never hug and kiss your children! Mother love may make your children’s infancy unhappy and prevent them from pursuing a career or getting married!” That’s total hogwash, of course. But it shows on extreme example of what state-of-the-art “scientific” parenting was supposed to be in early twentieth-century America. After all, that was the heyday of efficiency experts, time-and-motion studies, and the like.”
—Lawrence Kutner (20th century)