William Monroe Trotter (1872–1934) grew up in Boston, Massachusetts. An excellent student, he attended Harvard College and graduated magna cum laude in 1895. He was also the first African American at Harvard elected to Phi Beta Kappa. As Trotter prepared to enter the world of work, he wrote:

The conviction grew upon me that pursuit of business, money, civic or a literary

position was like building a house upon the sands, if race prejudice and persecution and public discrimination for mere color was to spread up from the South and result in a fixed caste of color.

Together with his wife, Geraldine Pindell, and two associates, he founded The Guardian newspaper in 1901. Its mission statement read in part:

We have come to protest forever against being proscribed or shut off in any caste from equal rights with other citizens, and shall remain forever on the firing line at any and all times in defense of such equal rights.

The paper remained true to its mission, agitating for immediate equal educational opportunities and full citizenship rights for Black people. Trotter campaigned against the establishment of Jim Crow practices in public transportation, and the systematic disenfranchisement of African Americans in the U.S. South as well as for national legislation against lynching. In his 1988 article for the Trotter Review, “William Monroe Trotter: A One-Man Protester for Civil Rights,” influential historian Robert C. Hayden wrote:

[Trotter’s] stress on militant protest for integration, legal and voting rights for 

blacks during the first quarter of this century became the hallmark of the modern civil rights movement of the 1954–65 period. William Monroe Trotter was a man fifty years ahead of his time.