page_title: William Monroe Trotter
section_title: Niagara Movement and the NAACP
hierarchical_section_title: William Monroe Trotter / Niagara Movement and the NAACP
caption_attribution_description: W. E. B. Du Bois
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: In the early months of 1905, Booker T. Washington sought to create an umbrella organization to represent all the major African-American leaders of the day.  Du Bois and Grimké were the two most radical leaders invited to its early organizational meetings, but both eventually refused to ally with Washington, whom they saw as dominating the group. Du Bois, Trotter, and two others organized a meeting of radicals from across the nation in western New York.  Meeting in July just across the Canada–US border in Fort Erie, Ontario they founded the Niagara Movement.  Organized so that no one man could dominate it, the group espoused a radical declaration of principles (authored by Trotter and Du Bois), calling for agitation for equal economic opportunity and exercise of full civil rights for African Americans.  The organization was soon divided internally by political and personal disagreements, and Washington worked from outside against its growth.
  During the early months of 1906, friction began to develop between Du Bois and Trotter over the admission of women to the organization. Du Bois supported the idea, and Trotter opposed it, but eventually relented. The matter was smoothed over during the 1906 meeting.  Their division became more significant when Trotter split with Clement Morgan, a longtime supporter and Movement member, over Massachusetts politics and control of the local Movement chapter. Du Bois sided with Morgan and, when the Movement met in Boston in 1907, he reappointed Morgan to a leading position in the organization. Attempts to heal the rift failed, and Trotter resigned from the Movement. Because of these difficulties, the organization had effectively collapsed by 1908. The break between Trotter and Du Bois was permanent, and they never worked directly together again. Du Bois wrote in 1909 that it was "utterly impossible to work with Mr. Trotter."
  Despite the Niagara Movement's failure, its goals had appealed to white supporters of racial equality. They participated in the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which drew an inter-racial coalition of support.  Trotter and Du Bois were both present at meetings in 1909 in which its foundation was laid.  Although some of Trotter's proposals were accepted (to address segregated transportation as a grievance), others were not (such as his proposal for a bill to make lynching a federal crime). Trotter was not invited to be on the organization's executive committee; neither was Booker T. Washington, who boycotted the effort.
  Trotter never played a significant role in the NAACP, and in its early years actively competed with it. In 1911 Trotter's group and the NAACP both held rallies in Boston to mark the centennial of abolitionist Charles Sumner's birth. Trotter was peripherally involved with the NAACP for a few years, but he did not approve of the amount of white involvement in the interracial group. His feud with Du Bois ran deep, so he rarely contributed to the organization at the national level. He was also troubled by the attitudes expressed in the Boston chapter, which he told NAACP leader Joel Spingarn needed more "radical, courageous activity." He eventually drifted away from the NAACP.
caption: W. E. B. Du Bois, 1904 photo
exif: {"Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "72", "Image YResolution": "72", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop 7.0", "Image DateTime": "2005:08:25 21:36:12", "Image ExifOffset": "156", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "294", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "3614", "EXIF ColorSpace": "Uncalibrated", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "1051", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "1512"}