The New York Times - Jennifer Szalai
William Monroe Trotter…shows up in the biographies of his contemporaries as a gadfly: radical, outspoken and indefatigable…That man comes through in Black Radical, Kerri K. Greenidge's spirited biography, an ardent and mostly approving account of Trotter's life that nevertheless conveys the more vexing elements of his personality.…Black Radical opens up a rich seam of inquiry that persists to this day, about the tug-of-war between reformers and radicals, and whether victories that seem purely symbolic at first can ripple out into real-world effects later on.
Publishers Weekly
★ 09/23/2019
Tufts University professor Greenidge debuts with a vital, deeply researched biography of William Monroe Trotter, founder, in 1901, of the Guardian, the “weekly newspaper of colored Boston.” Born in 1873 to a former slave turned Union Army lieutenant and a descendant of the Hemings clan once owned by Thomas Jefferson, Trotter graduated from Harvard in 1895 and launched a real estate career that, according to Greenidge, made him “one of the wealthiest black men in New England.” He founded the Guardian as an “arsenal” in the war for civil rights, using the paper’s editorial section to attack the accommodationist policies of Booker T. Washington and expose racial injustices in the Jim Crow South. As an activist, Trotter cofounded the Niagara Movement, a forerunner of the NAACP, with W.E.B. Du Bois in 1905; confronted President Woodrow Wilson over his segregationist policies during a 1914 White House visit; and led protests against the pro–Klu Klux Klan film The Birth of a Nation. But Trotter’s legal entanglements and poor business management skills, Greenidge writes, took a financial toll, and in April 1934 he jumped to his death from a rooftop. Greenidge writes with urgency and clarity while synthesizing a wealth of archival material. Her eye-opening account elegantly traces Trotter’s rise and fall and uncovers early 20th-century Boston as “the center of radical African American politics.” (Nov.)
Alondra Nelson
"This engaging account of the life of William Monroe Trotter reclaims the vital work of an unsung activist and the complex reality of the long civil rights movement. Black Radical reminds us that the historic fight against racial violence and injustice was as Northern as it was Southern, as renegade as it was reformist. An important book and a rich chronicle of the past with urgent lessons for today."
David Levering Lewis
"William Monroe Trotter was not only present at the creation of the modern civil rights movement, Kerri Greenidge's welcome biography establishes that by his visionary militancy and selfless financial support Trotter merits reconsideration as progenitor of the movement. A major addition to the literature."
Casey Cep
"[Trotter's] legacy presents a challenge to those who seek change today: is compromise a necessary evil of any social movement, or is it the original sin of collective action? These Greenidge argues that [his] protests, dismissed by many people at the time as publicity-seeking stunts, are Trotter’s real legacy.... One of the most satisfying accomplishments of Black Radical is the way that Greenidge situates Trotter’s biography in the broader story of liberal New England. Boston, Greenidge reminds her readers, incubated the politics of Malcolm X and of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., not to mention the writers Pauline Hopkins and Dorothy West."
Kiese Laymon
"Kerri Greenidge has created the rare book where the actual writing is as exquisite as the stunning research. Black Radical offers a lush layered story and a blueprint for liberation."
Jennifer Szalai
"Kerri K. Greenidge’s spirited biography [is] an ardent and mostly approving account of Trotter’s life that nevertheless conveys the more vexing elements of his personality…. Black Radical opens up a rich seam of inquiry that persists to this day, about the tug-of-war between reformers and radicals, and whether victories that seem purely symbolic at first can ripple out into real-world effects later on."
Henry Louis Gates
"In this engagingly written biography, historian Kerri Greenidge has penned a volume that provides a penetrating view of William Monroe Trotter’s radical thought and remarkable life. Black Radical incisively explores Trotter’s thirty years of editing and publishing the Guardian and brilliantly traces his influence on the emergence of “radical black consciousness at the turn of the twentieth century.” Moreover, this volume provides a detailed and compelling portrait of African American life in Boston; accessible to all readers, Greenidge’s new book is a valuable addition to the literature."
Kirkus Reviews
2019-08-26
A prominent newsman helped shape decades of civil rights activism.
Greenidge (Consortium of Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora/Tufts Univ.) makes her literary debut with an impressively researched biography of African American newspaperman and activist William Monroe Trotter (1872-1934), whose uncompromising views made him an influential—and controversial—figure. Born in Boston, raised among educated blacks dubbed "negrowumps," the precocious Trotter "was reading and writing entire Bible passages by four" and later participated, at his parents' dinner parties, in "passionate, often raucous debate over racial representation, political radicalism, and the continued deterioration of black civil rights." He enjoyed a comfortable middle-class childhood, taking piano lessons, playing tennis, and attending desegregated schools. After graduating at the top of his high school class, he went on to Harvard, where he was both popular and respected, a leader among his classmates. "Confident in the principles under which he'd been raised," Greenidge writes, "Monroe had no reason to believe that he and his colored fellows could not ‘plan a new world' in which all could contend for racial equality." That vision was undermined, as he saw it, by Booker T. Washington's insistence on "conservative racial uplift." Black citizens, Trotter believed, were being "duped into their own enslavement" by Washington's refusal to support black dissent and radical efforts to claim civil rights. In 1901, to counter those ideas, Trotter started his own newspaper, the Boston Guardian, aimed at working-class blacks. Within a short time, it became "the greatest race paper" in America, opening its readers' eyes to radical black politics in Boston and, as the years went on, throughout the country. Greenidge presents Trotter's growing prominence as a spokesman and gadfly in the context of economic, political, and often violent social upheaval in the first decades of the 20th century. A "prickly" and "inflammatory" personality, Trotter nevertheless attracted loyal followers, buoyed by his "populist demand for racial pride and political respect." He was, writes the author, "an icon of New Negro idealism, an unapologetic ‘race man' ready and willing to present his blackness before the world."
An absorbing biography that offers a fresh perspective on African American history.
