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Civil Rights Advocate

Many Civil Rights leaders of the past 100 years, men such as DuBois, Johnson, Wilkins and Fortune, have been writers. William Monroe Trotter was perhaps the most militant of them. An honor student and Phi Beta Keppa at Harvard, Trotter founded the Guardian, a militant newspaper, in 1901, for the purpose of "propaganda against discrimination."
In 1905, Trotter joined DuBois in founding the Niagara Movement but refused to move with him into the NAACP because he felt it would be too moderate. Instead, Trotter formed the National Equal Rights League. In 1919, Trotter appeared at the Paris Peace Conference in an unsuccessful effort to have it outlaw racial discrimination. The State Department had denied him a passport to attend, but he had reached Paris nonetheless, by having himself hired as a cook on a ship.

Because of his strident unwillingness to work with established groups, the Civil Rights Movement has been slow to recognize Trotter. But many of his methods were to be adopted in the 1950s, notably his use of nonviolent protest. In 1903, Trotter deliberately disrupted a meeting in Boston at which Booker T. Washington was to be arrested to gain publicity for militant position. Trotter also led demonstrations against plays and films which glorified Ku Klux Klan.