page_title: William Monroe Trotter
section_title: National Equal Rights League
hierarchical_section_title: William Monroe Trotter / National Equal Rights League
caption_attribution_description: English: US editorial cartoon from 1912 presidential election season. Shows candidates Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and William Howard Taft (left to right at top, and right to left at bottom). They are shown with confident smiling faces at top, labeled "How They're Acting"; below "How They Feel" they have uncertain worried faces. 1912 cartoon signed "Berryman".
context_page_description: William Monroe Trotter, sometimes just Monroe Trotter, 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.
  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.
context_section_description: After Trotter split from the Niagara Movement, he helped organize a conference of like-minded activists held in Philadelphia in April 1908, and served as the conference chair. In this capacity, he excluded any attendees whose racial ideology he opposed, as well as those who supported Republican William Howard Taft in the upcoming presidential election.  (Trotter opposed Taft because he had tired of what he considered the Republican Party laissez-faire policies on race.) This conference led to the formation of the Negro-American Political League, which eventually became known as the National Equal Rights League (NERL). Trotter described this group as "of the colored people and for the colored people and led by the colored people."
  NERL, which biographer Fox describes as Trotter's "personal fief", was unable to attract high-profile membership as the NAACP did. Trotter did not want white members, and was unable to work effectively with other African-American leaders. NERL and the NAACP, while both working toward similar goals, regularly feuded over matters public and personal.
  As the NAACP attracted more money and talent, and became the center of anti-Bookerite civil rights activity, Trotter and the NERL became increasingly marginalized on the left. Trotter would not have as prominent a role in the civil rights dialogue again. By 1921 the League had been reduced to a handful of Trotter supporters.
caption: Political cartoon about the 1912 presidential election, depicting Theodore Roosevelt (cowboy hat), Woodrow Wilson (cap), and William Howard Taft (top hat)
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