In her fascinating new biography, Black Radical: The Life and Times of William Monroe Trotter, Kerri K. Greenidge examines the complicated life and legacy of the African American activist and journalist. Tufts University historian Greenidge, who teaches in the Consortium of Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora and directs the American studies program, digs deeply into the archives of the post-Reconstruction North and explores how Trotter, frustrated by what he saw as the incrementalism of leaders like Booker T. Washington, embraced more radical populism.  The Harvard-educated tennis-and piano-playing Trotter, comes alive in Greenidge’s history and she deftly shows not only his considerable achievements, but how he alienated allies with competitiveness and pettiness. Writing with sensitivity and nuance, Greenidge presents the uncompromising Trotter as an important, and until now overlooked, civil rights leader. She shared her thoughts about Trotter, writing history, and her own family with The National.

Q: With respect for your elders, let’s start with your grandparents from whom you first learned of William Monroe Trotter. When your grandfather was musing about the 1974 “busing crisis” in Boston, and said “If Trotter were alive, none of that would have happened?” What did he mean by this?

 A: I think he reflected upon the feeling that many black Bostonians had after Trotter’s death in 1934 – that black New England lacked a radical, community-minded, nationally influential leader who could successfully articulate justice demands to the white establishment while remaining rooted within black communities themselves. 

My grandparents were incredibly active in civil rights work, both in the South End where they initially lived in the 1940s and early 1950s and then when they became one of the first black families to move to the suburbs in the mid-1950s.  They gathered equally active black suburbanites around them who tried to make life, education, and opportunity better for their children during the tumultuous 1950s and 1960s.  Although there were black leaders in Boston – Mel King and Elma Lewis particularly during the late 1960s – the city lost something when Trotter died.

Busing was a crisis of racism and discrimination and inequity, but it was also a crisis of leadership, what Ruth Batson called “the complete neglect” by the supposedly liberal establishment.  Trotter might have been controversial, he might have fanned flames of discord amongst his fellow “talented tenth,” but his famous statement – “agitate, agitate, agitate” – meant that black people across greater Boston recognized a leader in him that they lacked in later years.

Q: Your grandmother said that Trotter was a “race man with DuBois and James Weldon Johnson.” Why are they remembered while Trotter has been largely forgotten? Was he ignored or overlooked because of this personality or his politics – or do they reinforce one another?

A: William Monroe Trotter’s legacy suffered from three very real obstructions – the fact that he had no children to actively engage in public commemoration; the fact that he never left a written autobiography or autobiographical sketch of his life and work; and the fact that he was a notoriously difficult personality with which to work and maintain long term friendships.  Because he was so uncompromising in his politics – refusing, for instance, to countenance black editors who advertised skin bleaching and hair straightening products because they were “Benedict Arnolds of the negro race” – Trotter could never separate the personal from the political.  

His friendship with Du Bois, for instance, thrived and led to the Niagara Movement (one of the first black-led civil rights organizations of its time), but Du Bois’ decision to allow another friend – Clement Morgan – to lead the Boston branch of the Niagara Movement led to a feeling of personal betrayal.  The result was that he inspired others, and eventually gained their begrudging respect – the conservative Howard University professor Kelly Miller, for instance, eventually admitted that he was “one of the most treasured negroes of our time” despite decades of personal conflict – but Trotter’s name was avoided when these same colleagues reflected on their own lives and careers. 

Q: You seem to have read years of his weekly newspaper, the Guardian. Did you feel that he was evolving through these pages? Was he refining his thinking about radical black politics and solidarity?

A: I read every single copy of the Guardian, which is sprinkled across archives at the Boston Public Library, the Massachusetts Congregational Library, and the Howard Gottlieb Center for Archival Research at Boston University. 

I noticed that he became far more radical as the paper continued, but that the quality of the paper itself – spelling mistakes, for instance – deteriorated.  This was due, as I say in the book, to the loss of his co-editor, George W. Forbes, a brilliant intellectual who left the paper after the Boston Riot in 1903.  After that, Trotter continued to write the editorials – which are fantastic in terms of their politically radical analysis of everything from the direct election of Senators to racism in the labor movement – and other radicals wrote the copy. 

As my book shows, Trotter relied on the reporting and political analysis of radicals in Chicago, Oklahoma, New York, and Philadelphia, as well as D.C. and the rest of New England.  Unfortunately, after his wife died in 1918 – a woman who, I believe, oversaw much of the paper’s management and layout – the quality of the paper declined so rapidly that by the 1920s (arguably the most fascinating era of Trotter’s career), most of the Guardian included copy from other radical papers like Hubert Harrison’s Voice, A. Philip Randolph’s Messenger, and the black Caribbean paper, the Chronicle.

Q: While William Monroe Trotter is the central focus of your book, so many other characters were part of his story. His mother and sisters influenced him, but his wife Deenie was such a force in his life – and makes for fascinating reading. How did you go about researching her? And what about Trotter and women’s rights?

A: I am very clear in the book that the women in his life made it possible for Trotter to publish his newspaper while managing his own real estate business (for a time least) and traveling across the northeast to galvanize black communities.  His mother, Virginia Isaacs Trotter, grew up watching her own parents travel between free Ohio and slaveholding Virginia to rescue family and kin, so she was not a weak help meet to her husband, James Trotter, whose presence in the historical record is so strong. 

The barriers that face any historical and archival research of nineteenth century black women are daunting – as Darlene Clark Hine, Nell Irvin Painter, and other wonderful black women scholars before me have noted, these were women whose gender and race actively excluded them from census records and traditional archives so finding their voices requires creativity. 

I was able to find, however, that Virginia Isaacs Trotter’s skills as a businesswoman – managing her husband’s extensive properties in Hyde Park and Boston – provided the financial cushion that Trotter needed to invest in the Guardian.  I also found that his sisters – Maude and Bessie – managed the Guardian office and publication schedule alongside Geraldine “Deenie” Trotter, his wife. 

Remarkably, I also found that Deenie engaged in activism independently of her husband.  Her work on behalf of a wrongly convicted black man, for instance, lasted over ten years and led to the man’s successful release from prison.  In the letters between lawyers, governors, and congressmen it is Deenie, not Trotter, who received the accolades and praise from white activists and the prisoner’s family. 

All of this activism by the women in Trotter’s life, of course, merely emphasizes the scope of his misogyny – he famously stated that “women follow never lead” in black protest movements, and he refused to allow women to serve in the Niagara Movement on an equal basis with men.  The pathology behind this chauvinism, I argue, had everything to do with his role as prodigal – despite his difficult relationship with his father, Trotter was the focus of the family’s fortune and hopes, and he was catered to by his sister Maude (she answered most of his college correspondence). 

As a historian, I would argue that Trotter’s chauvinism illustrates how potentially toxic misogyny has less to do with women than it does with men – the presumption of excellence and success that is given to men in successful families like the Trotters, which negates the brilliance of the women in those same families.  Throughout Trotter’s life, after all, women ran his newspaper, offered him financial support and, eventually, housed him when he could not house or support himself.  This indicates that his misogyny was not incidental to his activism, but an enabler of his public politics.

Q: How did your previous work in the Park Service influence how you tell Trotter’s story? Does your work in public history shape how you write biography?

For over eight years – during college and then before Graduate school - I worked for Boston African American National Historic Site, a branch of the National Park service that interprets the ante-bellum history of Boston’s black community on Beacon Hill.  That experience was invaluable for many reasons, one of which was the time that it afforded me to read as much as I could of the extant scholarship on African American ante-bellum history, American abolitionist history, and the Black Radical tradition. 

As I conducted tours of the Black Heritage Trail, I also recognized that there was a gap in this scholarship both in terms of Reconstruction historiography and the legacies of radical black abolition.  I was also struck by the constant question that visitors had about what happened to Boston’s vibrant, fiercely radical ante-bellum black community once slavery ended.  Both of these realities – the scant scholarship on Reconstruction and its aftermath outside of the Confederate South, and the lack of serious inquiry into northern black politics before the Great Migrations of the 1920s – were subjects that trail visitors always wanted to know.  Because of these questions by the public – most of whom were ill-informed about black history and American history – I wanted to dissect Trotter’s life as a way of exploring radical abolition’s legacy and black radical politics before the 1920s, which is when most historians recognize the rise of northern black politics and voting.

The best part of working in public history, of course, is that it requires you to tell a story without the benefit of relying upon the academic language with which scholars are so familiar.  The public wants to hear a story, and because African American history is such a fascinating, engrossing, and interesting story, I honed the ability to tell that story without sacrificing rigorous scholarly integrity and method.  This one of the many reasons that I wanted to write Black Radical the way that I did – I wanted it to be historically and methodologically sound while engaging with complicated historical and political questions that general, reasonably educated readers can engage. 

Q: Thinking back over your years of research, was there a moment – looking at old photographs, newspapers or letters — when you thought, ah, I really know William Monroe Trotter?

A: I don’t think I could ever really know Trotter.  I don’t think many people did because he was so combative.  But I remember reading the Bureau of Investigation records made by agents of the Federal government who surveilled Trotter and other (mostly Caribbean born) radicals during the 1920s.  And in one of them, Trotter is sitting in a room in Harlem with all of these younger socialists, and communists, and pan-Africanists.  And when they start talking about plans for the militant African Blood Brotherhood, he became teary eyed that the people – his words – were no longer willing to follow him and that he was “too old.” 

That was a heartbreaking scene to imagine, but also provided the closest glimpse I think I ever got of him as a person – he was someone who really believed that black people themselves could decide the terms of their own freedom, if only they tied that freedom to radicalism in whatever form was most successful.  That is heartbreaking to me because his sincerity cannot be denied, even though his execution was often flawed.

Q: If you met him on the street today, is there a question you would like to ask him?

A: If I met Trotter on the street today, I would ask him about his greatest regrets.  I can theorize – he never had children, he lost his money, he did not treat his wife like the smart activist that she was until after her death – but I can’t be sure.  And given how he died in 1934 (he committed suicide), I surmise that his regrets were overwhelming.  I would also ask him if he believed that I did his life justice – it is such an obnoxious question but it is a question, nonetheless.  My greatest hope is that this book broadens the scope of scholarly inquiry into black radical politics beyond what we think we already know.

Q: Finally, you’re not the only distinguished Greenidge sister!  Kaitlyn Greenidge is the author of the excellent 2016 novel We Love You, Charlie Freeman.  Kirsten Greenidge is an Obie-winning playwright. Can you explain your latest collaboration, FemTour, and the creative spark you share? Oh, yes: Your birth order?

I am lucky enough to be related to many phenomenal black women, including my sisters.  Kirsten Greenidge is a playwright and she is the oldest; I am the middle; and Kaitlyn Greenidge is a novelist and the baby of the family.  We are all engaged with blackness and history and memory in various ways, which is why I always value their intellectual engagement above all others. 

Kaitlyn is and always has been the most prolific reader and studier that I have ever known – she was in preschool when she wrote her first book report and then proceeded to read everything she could about puppies in the encyclopedia.  Kirsten is a visionary artist – she has always had a brilliant grasp of dialogue and cadence and story.  She was the older sister who organized all of the neighborhood kids into plays and stage productions, but they were always so much more involved than most kids’ plays – she wrote them, she understood the music and the lighting and the blocking and this was during the 1980s when there was no internet or computers or adult support for that type of thing.

Because we all have interests in story, and blackness, and history, we have all had questions about public presentation of womanhood.  How has women’s history been displayed?  What is missing in such displays and how do public monuments, memorials, and tours ignore, erase, and/or engage with diverse women’s histories?  Kirsten was the one who suggested it – finding a way to tour public women’s history sites across the country in order to understand how we as black women (particularly her daughter, my niece, who is now twelve) are seen and how we see ourselves. 

Our goal is to visit public history sites and memorials and learn from historians, artists, and writers about how they engage with this history so that we can come to understand public stories about women and their lives.  We have visited historic sites in Seneca Falls and New England, but our goal is to uncover women’s stories across the country – LGBTQ, black, Native American, Latinx, Asian American – that have been ignored.  We are doing it, slowly but surely, as we publish our own work and embark on our own careers, but it is a dream of ours – to engage with public women’s history as a way to examine our collective understanding of gender, power, and politics.