Monroe Trotter: "The Guardian" of Boston
Boston Banner, The, Feb 18, 2010 by Manly, Howard
By modern-day media standards, the Boston Riot of 1903 wasn’t much of a riot
It was a noisy disturbance at most, and, particularly noisy to those who packed the Columbus Avenue AME Zion Church to support the featured orator, Booker T. Washington.
Booker T. was the preeminent voice on race relations in America at die turn of die century. From where he sat, and diat was frequently with U.S. presidents, the “Negro problem” would disappear if the recendy freed slaves would just learn to accept their role in society – at the bottom, in the fields, toiling still.
“We shall not agitate for political or social equality,” Washington declared in his famous Adanta Compromise speech. “Living separately, yet working together, bom races will determine the future of our beloved South.”
That sort of southern obeisance was widely accepted at the time by liberal whites and a lot of blacks, even in Northern cities like Boston, where me small black population depended on the white community for jobs and political patronage.
Monroe Trotter wasn’t one of them. He had his own money and his own politics and he used both to help start die “Guardian,” a weekly newspaper. Its mission, Trotter wrote, was to serve as “an organ which is to voice intelligently the needs and aspirations of the colored American.”
Trotter’s needs and aspirations were different than Booker T’s, especially on die issue of education, where Trotter, a Harvard man, believed diat blacks should learn the classics instead of only about vocational trades and agriculture, as Washington argued.
For nearly two years Trotter openly attacked Washington in die pages of the “Guardian,” and his upcoming speech in Boston provided Trotter a rare chance to confront Washington direcdy. “The policy of compromise has failed,” Trotter wrote. “The policy of resistance and aggression deserves a trial.”
The speech was scheduled on July 30, 1903. Trotter had prepared a handful of questions – nine of them to be exact – and based on die tone of his editorial published a week before the scheduled speech, none of them could have been exacdy objective. In fact, it was more dian a matter of philosophical differences between Trotter and Washington. It was personal.
“In view of die fact diat you are understood to be unwilling to insist upon the Negro having his every right (bom civil and political), would it not be a calamity at this juncture to make you our leader? “Trotter wrote. “Don’t you know you would help die race more by exposing die new form of slavery just outside me gates of Tuskegee dian preaching submission? Are the rope and the torch all the race is to get under your leadership?”
Quite naturally, Washington wasn’t listening to those sorts of questions, much less answering any of them, especially not while he had die podium inside die jammed church.
“As soon as I began speaking,” Washington wrote later, “the leaders, stationed in various parts of die house, began asking questions. In dus and in a number of other ways, they tried to make it impossible for me to speak”
One of those “otiler ways” was what Washington described as a “stench bomb” thrown into die crowd, supposedly by Trotter. No one really knows whedier diat part of die story was true. One thing is pretty clear: things quickly got out of control.
Historians paint a chaotic scene: radicals hissing and booing at Washington while others hissed and booed amid shouts of “Throw Trotter out die window.”
For his part, Trotter stood on a chair and shouted his questions. The shouting quickly turned to shoving and only ended when billy-club wielding cops plowed through die crowd and arrested Trotter and his associate, Greenville Martin.
Bodi were charged with inciting a riot and disorderly conduct, fined $50 and imprisoned for 30 days. Washington supporters were quick to pounce on die unruly Trotter.
It was a small price to pay. The sensationalized media coverage of the socalled Boston Riot demonstrated that Washington was not the only voice in the nation’s racial wilderness.
And more than most, Trotter understood die power of die press.
He knew he needed a wider audience to change die miserable condition of most blacks – and the stubborn attitudes of most whites
eating disorder treatments
Mar 8, 2010
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