By Melissa Savignano
A Boston area native who grew up in Arlington, Lexington, and Somerville, MA, Kerri Greenidge (GRS’12) came to BU with an eye toward local history. She wanted to study African American culture in New England at the turn of the 20th century, a topic she thought was lacking in academic research. And so she let that interest guide her studies in the American and New England Studies program, where she earned her PhD and worked with faculty from a range of CAS departments.
Now an assistant professor in the Department of Studies of Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora at Tuft University, Greenidge recently published Black Radical: The Life and Times of William Monroe Trotter. Trotter, an editor of the Guardian newspaper in Boston and an activist in the early 1900s, is an under-studied historical figure, and that was part of what drew her to study him. In her book, Greenidge demonstrates Trotter’s immense impact on black radicalism and on his more well-known contemporaries, including Marcus Garvey and Ida B. Wells. She contextualizes how the mercurial newspaperman fit into the world of black New England, and how he influenced that world.
We spoke with Greenidge about Trotter’s life and work, gaps in scholarship about the African American community in the Northeast, and how her two sisters inspire and influence her work.
Q: What prompted you to write Black Radical? How did you become interested in telling William Monroe Trotter’s story?
A: It was two things. The first is I grew up in the Greater Boston area. My father’s side was from Barbados but lived in Cambridge for generations and my mother’s side was from Boston. I grew up in the African American community and around people who were very steeped in protest tradition. When I was in school and when I went to college and wanted to study this tradition, I found a lot of the scholarship was limited for New England and Boston, except for the early 19th century in abolition or busing in the 1970s. Studying beyond that was a personal goal of mine.
The second goal was when I was in grad school, I had always been drawn to William Monroe Trotter as a person and his story and was frustrated that, except for one written in 1970, there was no study of his life and his work. So those two things, the family history and the connection to this place and my interest in him as a person, prompted me to write it. I got my doctorate at BU and when I did, this was a time [2012], and I think this has changed, but I was told that wanting to do work on African Americans in New England was going to be hard. Being me, I decided I was going to do it anyways, and Trotter was a chapter in my dissertation, so I had this vision that I would eventually write a biography that was more encompassing.
Q: In the book, you focus a lot on the context Trotter lived in—the North at the turn of the 20th century. What was life like for educated black people like Trotter in the North at that time?
A: The early 20th century was a period of paradoxes in the North for African Americans. On one hand, the North, and particular New England, had fewer instances of overt racial violence and violent segregation. The Northeast had a history of white radical abolition, which translated to this liberal sensibility, and support from the region’s liberal establishment and black education.
However, back then the North, and New England, was also a place that was rampant with racial discrimination, particularly in housing and employment, and was also a place where most Northern white progressives—even though they supported what they called the “negro’s cause”—had all these views about the capabilities of African American people that were much more conservative. They included the idea that African Americans shouldn’t be allowed to vote. In the 1900s, if you were an African American in Boston, the city offered a lot of opportunities and a resident called it the “mecca of the negro” in the 1890s. Despite all of that, you still had all these economic and racial disparities across the region.
Q: What does it say about Boston at that time that someone like Trotter could publish an outspoken newspaper like The Guardian? Do you think that he would have faced more local resistance if his criticism were aimed mainly at life in the North, rather than conditions in the South?
A: I think he came from the black radical tradition within Boston and New England, so that core community support was what really launched his career and what made him into this national radical presence. Trotter was a leader made for Boston just as Boston was a city made for Trotter, and the two can’t be separated from one another.
I do think it’s interesting that if he had lived in another city, he probably wouldn’t have had the same community response to him as a presence and as a leader because he was initially considered so controversial outside of Boston and New England. In New England, he and his family were well-known and, in other parts of the country, I think that would’ve gotten in his way. There’s this sympathetic relationship between the city and Trotter, and definitely part of that had to do with his connections to the black community here.
Q: How did growing up in the Boston area influence your work and interest in studying Trotter?
A: I grew up around African Americans, in the 1970s, ’80s, and into the ’90s, who were local and who were active in not only civil rights but all sorts of rights movements. When I would be in school and get an education about the civil rights movement, it was very hard to find those types of people in the stories. That definitely influenced my background; both of my grandparents were activists in the 1940s thru the 1980s, so I got a lot of stories of Boston’s black community from them, like in the South End where my mom was born. I got all these stories about blackness in Boston and New England, and my grandmother was from Portsmouth, New Hampshire and grew up in a black community there. I had this different perspective on New England and Greater Boston than most people have. I always had this view of blackness here that is often neglected by the scholarship.
Q: Trotter’s intense personality played a large role in how he was perceived by his contemporaries. W.E.B. Du Bois called Trotter “a clean-hearted, utterly unselfish man whom I admired despite his dogged and unreasoning prejudices.” How did Trotter’s “dogged” personality help him overcome obstacles, and how did that same personality get in his way?
A: I think his dogged and determined personality allowed him to be bold at a time when—particularly African American men—weren’t supposed to be bold. They were supposed to not push the boundaries and not criticize other leaders. Because he was so dogged, he really had no shame in that approach. That personality trait also made him very passionate, so he took everything so personally. I think he took so much of his civil rights struggle and radical struggle personally that it became very hard for him to separate the personal from the political. And it made him, I say this at talks all the time, I think it made him someone who wasn’t always pleasant to be around, as a person, an activist, and an agitator. Everything was about activism and agitation, and because he felt things so personally, he could turn on an individual quickly, whether that person was in the wrong or not.
Q: You describe him as a “radical populist.” Can you elaborate on what made Trotter both a radical and a populist?
A: He was steeped in this black militant abolitionist tradition. His mother helped steer fugitive slaves from Virginia to freedom in Ohio, and his father was a veteran of the Union army and a starch Democrat when most African Americans were Republicans. Part of his radicalism came from that tradition and that past. He really believed in the radical abolitionist step, similar to people like David Walker and Frederick Douglass, which was that black communities had to free themselves and that was the only way freedom and emancipation would come. That made him a leader amongst the radicals that came around in the early 20th century: Marcus Garvey, Philip Randolph, Ida B. Wells.
As far as a populist, he was somebody whose newspaper became the engine for a black resistance movement in Boston, and that quickly spread out amongst other communities. He was always good in the newspaper at preaching to not just people of his same class (e.g., people from Harvard or Yale who were relatively well-educated). He was good at condensing info and not talking down to people but in terms people could understand. That’s what made him a populist and, in the later part of his life, he was someone who thought the majority of black folk were the people who needed to decide the terms of emancipation and of freedom.
Q: Is there a “radical populist” strain in African American intellectual history, and who would you say is part of that strain besides Trotter?
A: Timothy Thomas Fortune was the editor of the New York Age, and Trotter had a huge falling out with him. Fortune was doing radical work in New York City. Also, Ida B. Wells and Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, two women who were authors and activists, and Wells particuarly in anti-lynching. Reverend Matthew A. N. Shaw, who is not as well known, but he was from Jamaica and the pastor of the Twelfth Baptist Church in Boston and a leader amongst Jamaicans in his native country. Marcus Garvey and Hubert Henry Harrison, who was a famous black socialist in Harlem and was considered for a time the leading black radical leftist in Harlem and in New York City generally. All of those people are strands within the book, and when I was researching, I became more surprised with how much Trotter corresponded with them and how much they looked to him as a leader in radical thought.
Q: You mention “there are lessons yet to be learned from his imperfect, yet sincere, battle for racial justice.” What are some of those lessons a modern audience and reader can take away from Trotter’s work? What do his successes and failures have to teach advocates for social justice today?
A: The lesson of Trotter is all protests for racial justice never kind of just happen overnight. They take a lot of strands of activism within a movement to progress to a certain situation and level of emancipation and justice. His life in terms of younger activists is a lesson in how this sort of radical activism can take a toll on a life and a person. I don’t think that’s a negative thing—it’s just honest about what happens to people when they are so invested in the greater good and justice, which happens to them over a lifetime if they continue to be heavily steeped in that tradition. I also think, for today, the notion that people who themselves are victims of injustice are the people who need to decide the terms upon which justice is created. So that doesn’t mean you can’t have coalitions across racial, class, and ethnic lines, but it does mean the people most affected by legislation or lack thereof are the people who should determine the terms in which they are delivered.
Q: In today’s media landscape, how vital is an independent black press? Do you think Trotter would be encouraged by black people’s ability to mobilize and communicate with each other about racial issues today?
A: I think at the moment an independent press by any group is under attack. It’s hard to find an independent press of the people that comes out weekly or daily in our media age that’s truly not tied to anything and has people who are educated in something other than what they are presenting on their platform. He would have been discouraged by that. But he also would have seen a lot of parallels in his own time with the same issue. When he was writing, the press was either controlled by the Democratic or Republican party and their interests, so you couldn’t get a straight independent press.
I think he would actually take heart in the rise of Twitter and social media as a way for people to document what’s happening in real time to their community, which is something he didn’t have but every week he served that function in his paper, talking about lynchings or acts of violence the regular press wasn’t covering. He would be hearted by the possibilities of today and the way technology can be used in popular protests, which is leaps and bounds over what he saw. But he would be perturbed, as he was in his own time, by the fact that media and news were being controlled by specific interests.
Q: What drew you to your field of study, and to studying it at BU specifically before taking your current position at Tufts?
A: I took a lot of time off before I went back to grad school. I worked for many years at the National Park Service as a historian in Boston. As I was doing that job, I began to ask, based on the history I studied there, what happened after the Civil War? What happened to that radical abolitionist impulse that was in Boston once slavery ended?
I wasn’t able to find sources that satisfied the questions I had, so I looked around immediately for a program, and I found the American and New England Studies program at Boston University. I found at the time Nina Silber, who is now in the history department, and other scholars like Marilyn Halter, who is now a professor emerita. And then when I came to BU, my focus became on African American literature and protest and what that looks like, and I studied with Gene Jarrett in the English Department, who is now the Seryl Kushner Dean at New York University’s College of Arts & Sciences and Jack Matthews in the BU English Department. Those were my mentors. I had this core group of faculty who I wanted to learn from and read what they were reading and writing.
I always say I never knew I was going to become a professor. I thought, “I’m going to go to grad school and just learn,” and then I graduated and had to get a job. When I left BU [in May 2012], I taught at UMass, Boston and was an adjunct at BU. I realized that I was older, that I actually like 19 to 20 year olds when I didn’t like that crowd in undergrad, and I have a lot of respect for that generation and how they think and I realized I like teaching. My job at Tufts I got a few years ago. I’m happy and have a good community and it’s near Boston, so I have a lot of young people and young people’s energy around me.
Q: You come from an artistic family. Your older sister Kirsten Greenidge is a playwright (and Assistant Professor of Playwriting and Theatre Arts at Boston University) and your younger sister Kaitlyn Greenidge is a novelist. Do you ever bounce ideas off each other or collaborate? Is your work influenced by your relationships with your siblings?
A: We all have a passion and interest in history, in literature, in storytelling and in blackness as a form of storytelling. We riff off each other because we have the same outlook. We all live together, so it’s a continuous conversation. Both are brilliant, we absorb what the others are doing. I always look to them for reading advice and writing advice, but we tend to keep each of our careers separate.
However, we are collaborating on something we call “Fem Tour” in an effort to chronical women’s public history sites. Over the last few years, it’s been less on our minds, but with the coronavirus, it’s on our minds again. All three of us are invested in that, and seeing what it will look like, if it will become a podcast or a book. My older sister has two kids who are now 10 and 12, and they are dragged with us to all these sites, and Kaitlyn’s new baby will be dragged with us too. That project is really fun but also a chance to work together in a serious way. They are the two most brilliant people I know, so I’m very lucky.
Q: How did researching and writing about Trotter influence your own outlook on the world? And what projects are next for you?
A: Looking at Trotter gave me an appreciation for the history of local communities and that, no matter how much you know about national history or get a doctorate in a historical moment, really getting into a community and a group of people is fascinating and valuable because you see what politics and culture are like up close. It gave me much more appreciation of that.
My next book is a biography about the Grimké family [social activists from the 1800s]. The white Grimké family were the sisters [Sarah and Angelina] who were white feminists in the 19th century, but their brother [Henry] had children with an enslaved black woman [Nancy Weston] and the black Grimkés [Archibald, Francis, and John] became leaders in the turn-of-the-century black community in the United States. I will look at the whole family and how they dealt with racial trauma, success, and failure and how that was influenced by the politics of this time. That is the next book, if I can get writing done during this time!
Q: Any parting advice?
A: Use the place you are, whatever institution you are at, and use the resources you have at your disposal. Appreciate the professors at BU. Being a professor now and hearing my colleagues’ experiences with professors, it was not like with mine at BU. I had a great time and I had really accessible and smart and engaged professors and I don’t know if that’s everyplace or many places. That was the core of the program at CAS. Grad school and the job market is hard, but you have to think of it as what you can do—don’t narrow yourself down to just being a professor. As we enter the next phase of the world, those are paramount for people considering grad school.