Dorchester Illustration no. 2375 William Monroe Trotter and Geraldine Pindell Trotter
Geraldine L. Pindell purchased the home at 97 Sawuer Avenue on March 31, 1899. She married William Monroe Trotter later that year. Along with her husband, she was a civil rights activist and editor of The Guardian newspaper.
Although their home was designated a Boston Landmark in 1977, the designation was prepared on the basis of William’s activities. He would not have achieved all he did without Geraldine’s support and involvement in their work.
excerpts from the designation of 97 Saywer Avenue as a Boston Landmark:
At a time when Trotter was preparing to embark upon a career in real estate and a comfortable life in Boston’s upper-class Afro-American society, blacks throughout the country were rapidly being relegated to the bottom of a caste system. Reconstruction had been compromised and failed. By 1877 conservative whites had “restored” the South, but had not completely eliminated blacks from politics. Thus, the 1890s witnessed a resurgence of violence and racial animosity designed to disfranchise blacks.
In March 1901, Trotter helped to organize the Boston Literary and Historical Association which served as a forum for militant political opinion expressed by such notables as W.E.B. DuBois, Oswald Garrison Villard and Charles Chesnutt. Trotter also joined the more politically oriented Massachusetts Racial Protective Association.
One of Trotter’s greatest contributions to black protest came when he and his friend George Forbes founded The Guardian in 1901, a weekly newspaper that increasingly consumed the time and talents of Trotter. Most of his more virulent criticism was reserved for Booker T. Washington’s accommodationist approach to race relations, at a time when blacks were witnessing a steady deterioration in their position in the South and across the nation as a whole. Trotter strenuously objected to what he perceived as Washington’s overemphasis on industrial education and the relegation of black people to a state of serfdom. He believed that the franchise was a sacred right and an indispensable means for achieving power.
In the early 1900s Trotter formed the Boston Suffrage League. The League was expanded into the New England Suffrage League as blacks from other areas joined. The aim of the group was to place before the American people wrongs against the claims of blacks. Trotter was elected president. He pressed for anti-lynching legislation, the expenditure of one hundred-twenty million dollars a year on southern schools until 1925, the elimination of segregation on interstate carriers and the enforcement of the Fifteenth Amendment.
As a political activist Trotter believed that political power resulted from the exercise of the franchise. His actions were based upon the belief that blacks should remain politically independent, voting as a block to swing close elections to the candidates who offered the most to black people. Although Trotter praised Theodore Roosevelt for appointing a black man collector of customs for the Port of Charleston, he later strongly opposed Roosevelt for his inaction concerning the problems of black people. Trotter was horrified and outraged at the way Roosevelt handled the Brownsville incident of 1906 in which black soldiers were summarily dismissed from the armed service without honor. Anxious to defeat both Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, Trotter turned to the Democrats in 1907 in the belief that it was better to vote for a known enemy than false friends.
During Woodrow Wilson’s races for governor of New Jersey and later, for President, Trotter and his National Independent Political League (NIPL) endorsed Wilson. With DuBois’ endorsement in The Crisis, Wilson managed to draw a considerable number of black votes from the Republican party. Later Trotter was appalled by the President’s sanction of segregation in federal offices in Washington.
Concerned over the course of events in Washington, Trotter and the NIPL drafted a petition signed by 20,000 people from 36 states to present to Wilson. In November of 1913, Trotter, Ida Wells-Barnett, William Sinclair, among others, were granted a meeting with the President. Wilson received them politely but did not commit himself. A year passed with no effort on the part of the Administration to improve the plight of blacks. On November 14, 1914, Trotter again had a meeting with Wilson in which no commitment to change was made.
Trotter continued to publish The Guardian and to rally to the cause of black people, particularly black soldiers during World War I. He maintained that blacks would fight better in war if they could anticipate better treatment in peace. When the War ended, Trotter, in spite of a State Department ban against blacks going to Europe for the Peace Conference, managed to get to Paris where he pleaded the cause of people of color before the nations of the world. He protested the failure to include a clause on racial justice in the Peace Treaty. He did an excellent job in educating the French, however, he received no response from President Wilson or the newly created League of Nations.
During the 1920s Trotter gave his support to the Dyer’s Anti-Lynching Bill in 1922, but spoke out against Garvey’s Back-To-Africa Movement. As late as 1933 he petitioned Franklin D. Roosevelt to end segregation in the District of Columbia.
Tired, distraught and burdened by the times and his own years of protest, Trotter died in April 1934. Thus came to an end the life of a black man and an outstanding American who lived his entire life in the American revolutionary tradition of protest against injustice — wherever it was found. His life is exemplary of his desire to bridge the gap between the ideals of the nation and its practices which compromised the rights of black Americans. William Monroe Trotter never ceased to view the country from the perspective of its founding documents of freedom and equality for all men.