page_title: William Monroe Trotter
section_title: Trotter and Woodrow Wilson
hierarchical_section_title: William Monroe Trotter / Trotter and Woodrow Wilson
caption_attribution_description: Home of William Monroe Trotter in the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts.
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: Trotter's opposition to Booker T. Washington placed him at odds with Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, Republican presidents who relied on Washington as an adviser and otherwise enjoyed widespread African-American support. Trotter supported the southern Democrat Woodrow Wilson in the 1912 election.  Wilson, in a brief meeting with Trotter and other NERL members, made vague statements about fair treatment of African Americans. But, he succumbed to pressure from Southerners in his cabinet and agreed to segregate federal offices. The NAACP and NERL (then known as the National Independent Political League, or NIPL) protested, and Trotter secured a meeting with Wilson at the White House in November 1913.  Wilson said that his policies were not segregationist, but Trotter characterized Wilson's denial as "preposterous".
  Trotter continued his protests, eventually gaining a second invitation to the White House in November 1914. This meeting with Wilson ended with a heated exchange between the two men.  Wilson claimed to be dealing with a "human problem" from which politics should be left out, and suggested to Trotter's group that they could always vote for someone else in the next election. Trotter continued to argue that the segregationist policy was humiliating to African Americans. Wilson responded, "If you take it as a humiliation, which it is not intended as, and sow the seed of that impression all over the country, why the consequences will be very serious." After Trotter said this was an insult, Wilson angrily ordered him to leave, saying "If this organization wishes to approach me again, it must choose another spokesman ... your tone, sir, offends me."
  Trotter's second meeting with the President was widely covered in the press, featured on the front page of the New York Times and other leading newspapers.  A white Texas newspaper described Trotter as "merely a nigger" and "not a Booker T. Washington type of colored man", and northern papers also criticized him for his "insolence" to the president.  The Boston Evening Transcript, while observing that Wilson's policy was segregationist and divisive, pointed out that although Trotter was basically correct, he "offends many of his own color by his ... untactful belligerency".  African Americans were divided in their response to the incident: some claimed that he did not represent them, while others, notably Du Bois, grudgingly admired Trotter's audacity. Du Bois wrote that Wilson was "insulting & condescending" in the meeting. Trotter parlayed the publicity into a series of speaking engagements, in which he denied "that in language, manner, tone, in any respect or to the slightest degree I was impudent, insolent, or insulting to the President."
  Trotter continued to protest segregationist policies of the Wilson administration. When the country began large-scale recruiting for the military in World War I, Trotter opposed the establishment of segregated officer training facilities.  Through his influence, recruitment of blacks in the Boston area was lower than expected. During World War II, the military integrated the officer corps, and President Harry Truman afterward completed integration of the armed services.
  When the Great War ended, Trotter sought to use the 1919 Paris Peace Conference as a vehicle to raise international awareness of US government policy toward African Americans. He viewed the reality of segregation as incompatible with Wilson's war vision to "make the world safe for Democracy."  Trotter organized a meeting in Washington, DC related to the peace conference; he and ten other African-American delegates were chosen to attend the peace conference. The State Department refused to issue passports to those delegates, or to African Americans planning to attend a Pan-African Congress that Du Bois was organizing to be held concurrently with the peace conference in Paris. Du Bois and other African Americans were supporting African colonies' desire for independence.
  To get to Europe, Trotter posed as a seaman seeking work in New York, and got a job as a coo
caption: The William Monroe Trotter House in Dorchester
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