By Peter F. Stevens

(On Sunday, Feb. 24 at 2:00 p.m., the Dorchester Historical Society will present a slide show and lecture by historian Robert Hayden on Trotter's life at the DHS Headquarters, the William Clapp House, 195 Boston Street. -Editor)

He was unafraid to take on presidents, politicians, or Ku Klux Klansmen.

Long before the term "Civil Rights" entered the American lexicon, Dorchester resident William Monroe Trotter dedicated his life and his fortune to battling prejudice. No one in the opening decades of the 20th Century decried racism and segregation with more passion and courage than the man from Sawyer Avenue.

On April 7, 1872, William Monroe Trotter was born in Chillicothe, Ohio, one of the three children of James Monroe Trotter and Virginia Isaac Trotter. When William was a young child, the family moved to Boston, where his father found a solid job at the post office and eventually became involved in real estate.

The only African American in Hyde Park high school, William Trotter Monroe, despite the racism he endured, flourished in his studies. In 1891, he was accepted at Harvard, gaining renown as the first of his race ever to win membership in Phi Beta Kappa.

Soon after his graduation, in 1894, Trotter took a job with a white-owned real estate outfit, learning the ins and outs of the business. The young

Harvard man, brimming with ambition, struck off on his own in 1899 by opening his own real estate company. To the surprise of no one who knew him well, he proved successful.

Trotter, having carved a profitable niche in Boston business circles, turned his attention towards the plight of African Americans. In 1901 he poured his energy and his hard-won fortune into the establishment of his own newspaper, The Guardian, his avowed purpose to fight "against discrimination based on color and denial of citizenship rights because of color." The crusade of the Dorchester businessman had begun in earnest.

Trotter had little use for African American leaders whose policies included any compromises on civil rights, his stance pitting him against famed black leader Booker T. Washington. As the Guardian garnered more attention in Boston and beyond, many Americans - African Americans and whites alike - were shocked by the verbal vitriol Trotter doused on Washington. According to the history The Black 100, "Trotter's direct actions against Booker T. Washington and his 'Tuskeegee Movement,' and Trotter's temerity in confronting non-blacks and other black leaders of his day on issues affecting blacks earned him a reputation as the first influential 'militant' black leader of the twentieth century."

By 1905, Trotter had allied himself with W.E.B. DuBois and other black leaders, as well as a handful of forward-thinking whites, to combat what they decried as "Washington's accomodationist policies and tactics." Lerone Bennett writes: "William Monroe Trotter, who was the advance man of a new breed of black activists who fleshed out the renaissance of the black soul…A throwback to the activists of the antislavery era and an anticipation of the rebels of the 1960s…Raised on the myths of the abolitionist period, he made himself over into an image of the old abolitionist, dedicating himself and all he had to the destruction of the Booker T. Washington image and the Booker T. Washington idea.

In 1901, at the height of the reaction, he opened his anti-Washington campaign by founding the Boston Guardian. To make sure no one missed the point, [Trotter] opened the newspaper office in the same building that had housed William Lloyd Garrison's Liberator."

Trotter's feud with Washington and his policies of "appeasement with whites" came to a head on July 30, 1903, at the Columbus Avenue African Zion Church in Boston. A throng had gathered inside and outside the church to listen to the featured speaker - Booker T. Washington. Among the crowd were Trotter and a cadre of his supporters.

As Washington began to speak, Trotter and his friends hissed, jeered, and shouted a running commentary to Washington's remarks. Some in the crowd glared at Trotter, but he would not be silenced.

Washington would write: "As soon as I began speaking, the leaders, stationed in various parts of the house, began asking questions.

"In this and in a number of other ways, they tried to make it impossible for me to speak."

According to various sources, one of those "other ways" to protest

Washington's words was "a stench bomb" hurled into the crowd. Trotter, several of his foes contended, was the "bomb-tosser," but no one would prove it to a certainty.

With the meeting on the verge of a riot, the police were called. As the billy-club wielding "boys in blue" waded into the crowd, Washington's supporters pointed out Trotter. The police seized him and hauled him off to the Charles Street Jail with his associate Greenville Martin. The pair were soon fined and sentenced to thirty days in prison. Washington, understating the case, said that Trotter "remained unrepentant."

Determined to create an organization to challenge Washington's power, Trotter and W.E.B. DuBois organized in 1905 the Niagara Movement, the precursor of the NAACP. Trotter, continuing his crusade from Boston to Washington, D.C., verbally confronted President Theodore Roosevelt over the racially fueled discharge of three black companies of the 25th U.S. Infantry Regiment, unleashed a successful demonstration to shut down the race-baiting play "The Clansman in Boston," and, in 1915, picketed the Boston theatre screening the racially tinged film "Birth of a Nation." For the protest, he was once again arrested, but was acquitted by a jury.

On November 12, 1914, Trotter and a delegation of African American leaders met with President Woodrow Wilson, who had promised during his 1912 campaign that "the colored people may count on me for absolute fair dealing." Not long after that statement, Wilson had signed off on racial segregation in the Treasury Department and in the Post Office.

Trotter, seething at the policy, minced no words with the president. In a

"man to man talk" with Wilson, Trotter accused him of creating "a new slavery for your Afro-American fellow citizens...As equal citizens and by virtue of your public promises, we are entitled at your hands to freedom from discrimination, restriction, imputation, and insult in government employ."

Wilson, angry at Trotter's bluntness, retorted that "if the organization he [Trotter] represented wished to approach him again, it must choose another spokesman."

No one, Wilson said to Trotter, "had ever come into the White House and addressed the president in such a tone and with such a background of passion.."

Until Trotter's death in 1934, the crusader battled racial discrimination, his methods of protests and picketing proving to be harbingers of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. Trotter, writes historian Robert C. Hayden, was "a man fifty years ahead of his time."

In 1976, the house at 97 Sawyer Avenue was designated a National Historic Landmark. Today, the home, where William Monroe Trotter spent countless hours writing against racism and planning demonstrations, is a fitting symbol for Black History Month.

(Journalist Peter F. Stevens is the author of The Rogue's March: John Riley and the St. Patrick's Battalion, 1846-48, Brassey's, and Notorious and Notable New Englanders, Down East Books.)