William Monroe Trotter, Date of Birth, Date of Death
TweetWilliam Monroe Trotter
American newspaper founder, African-American civil rights activist
Date of Birth: 07-Apr-1872
Date of Death: 07-Apr-1934
Profession: publisher
Nationality: United States
Zodiac Sign: Aries 
About William Monroe Trotter
- William Monroe Trotter (sometimes just Monroe Trotter, April 7, 1872 – April 7, 1934) was a newspaper editor and real estate businessman based in Boston, Massachusetts, and an activist for African-American civil rights.
- He was an early opponent of the accommodationist race policies of Booker T.
- Washington, and in 1901 founded the Boston Guardian, an independent African-American newspaper he used to express that opposition.
- Active in protest movements for civil rights throughout the 1900s and 1910s, he also revealed some of the differences within the African-American community.
- He contributed to the formation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Trotter was born into a well-to-do family and raised in Hyde Park, Massachusetts.
- He earned his graduate and post-graduate degrees at Harvard University, and was the first man of color to earn a Phi Beta Kappa key there.
- Seeing an increase in segregation in northern facilities, he began to engage in a life of activism, to which he devoted his assets.
- He joined with W.
- E.
- B.
- Du Bois in founding the Niagara Movement in 1905, a forerunner of the NAACP.
- Trotter's style was often divisive, and he ended up leaving that organization and founding the National Equal Rights League.
- His protest activities were sometimes seen to be at cross purposes to those of the NAACP. In 1914 he had a highly publicized meeting with President Woodrow Wilson, in which he protested Wilson's introduction of segregation into the federal workplace.
- In Boston, Trotter succeeded in 1910 in shutting down productions of The Clansman but he was unsuccessful in 1915 with screenings of the movie The Birth of a Nation, which also portrayed the Ku Klux Klan in favorable terms.
- He was not able to influence the peace talks at the end of World War I, and was in later years a marginalized voice of protest.
- In an alliance with Roman Catholics, in 1921 he did get a revival screening banned of The Birth of a Nation.
- He died on his 62nd birthday after a possibly suicidal fall from his Boston home.
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