The award-winning biography that restores William Monroe Trotter to his essential place next to Douglass, Du Bois, and Malcom X in the pantheon of American civil rights heroes.
Black Radical reclaims William Monroe Trotter (1872–1934) as a seminal figure whose prophetic yet ultimately tragic—and all too often forgotten—life offers a link from Frederick Douglass to Black Lives Matter. Kerri K. Greenidge renders the drama of turn-of-the-century America, showing how Trotter, a Harvard graduate, a newspaperman and an activist, galvanized black working-class citizens to wield their political power despite the virulent racism of post-Reconstruction America. Situating his story in the broader history of liberal New England to “satisfying” (Casey Cep, The New Yorker) effect, this magnificent biography will endure as the definitive account of Trotter’s life, without which we cannot begin to understand the trajectory of black radicalism in America.
Kerri K. Greenidge is Mellon Associate Professor at Tufts University. Her previous book, Black Radical: The Life and Times of William Monroe Trotter, won the 2020 Mark Lynton History Prize, among other awards. She lives in Westborough, Massachusetts.
Table of Contents
Introduction: Looking Out from the Dark Tower ix
Chapter 1 Abolition's Legacy: Radical Racial Uplift and Political Independence 1
Chapter 2 Becoming the Guardian: The Perils of Conservative Racial Uplift 30
Chapter 3 The Greatest Race Paper in the Nation 63
Chapter 4 Of Riots, Suffrage Leagues, and the Niagara Movement 99
Chapter 5 Negrowump Revival 133
Chapter 6 The New Negro Legacy of the Trotter-Wilson Conflict 165
Chapter 7 From The Birth of a Nation to the National Race Congress 201