Black Radical: The Life and Times of William Monroe Trotter

Please note: This talk will be presented via Zoom, and participants must register by noon on the day of the event to receive the link by email that afternoon. If you have not received the link by 3pm, please contact us by 5:30 so that we can resend it.

William Monroe Trotter (1872– 1934), though still virtually unknown to the wider public, was an unlikely American hero. With the stylistic verve of a newspaperman and the unwavering fearlessness of an emancipator, he galvanized black working- class citizens to wield their political power despite the violent racism of post- Reconstruction America. For more than thirty years, Harvard-educated Trotter edited and published the Guardian, a weekly Boston newspaper that was read across the nation. Defining himself against the gradualist politics of Booker T. Washington and the elitism of W. E. B. Du Bois, Trotter advocated for a radical vision of black liberation that prefigured leaders such as Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr. Synthesizing years of archival research, historian Kerri Greenidge renders the drama of turn-of-the-century America and reclaims Trotter as a seminal figure, whose prophetic, yet ultimately tragic, life offers a link between the vision of Frederick Douglass and black radicalism in the modern era.

Kerri K. Greenidge is Mellon Assistant Professor in the Department of Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora at Tufts University, where she also directs the American studies program. She lives in Massachusetts.

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  Heroic Imagination by Symphony by the Sea

  Sunday, May 05, 2024 3:00p

  The Cabot Theater
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  Wednesday, Apr 24, 2024 goes until 04/26

  WBUR CitySpace at The Lavine Broadcast Center

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