William Monroe Trotter House
Encyclopedia
The William Monroe Trotter House, is located at 97 Sawyer Avenue atop Jones Hill in the Dorchester
Dorchester, Massachusetts
Dorchester is a dissolved municipality and current neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts, United States. It is named after the town of Dorchester in the English county of Dorset, from which Puritans emigrated and is today endearingly nicknamed "Dot" by its residents. Dorchester, including a large...

 neighborhood of Boston. It was the home of African-American journalist William Monroe Trotter
William Monroe Trotter
William Monroe Trotter was a newspaper editor and real estate business man, and an activist for African-American civil rights. He earned his undergraduate and graduate degrees at Harvard University, and was the first man of color to earn a Phi Beta Kappa key...

. He and his wife Geraldine Louise Pindell moved into the two-story wood frame home when they were married in June, 1899.

A graduate of Harvard College
Harvard College
Harvard College, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is one of two schools within Harvard University granting undergraduate degrees...

, Trotter helped organize the "Boston Literary and Historical Association" in 1901, a forum for militant political thinkers like W. E. B. Du Bois and Oswald Garrison Villard
Oswald Garrison Villard
Oswald Garrison Villard was an American journalist. He provided a rare direct link between the anti-imperialism of the late 19th century and the conservative Old Right of the 1930s and 1940s.-Biography:...

. The same year, he founded The Guardian, a weekly newspaper in which he regularly criticized educator Booker T. Washington
Booker T. Washington
Booker Taliaferro Washington was an American educator, author, orator, and political leader. He was the dominant figure in the African-American community in the United States from 1890 to 1915...

 for his accommodationist policies. He was also a founder, along with Du Bois, of]] the Niagara Movement
Niagara Movement
The Niagara Movement was a black civil rights organization founded in 1905 by a group led by W. E. B. Du Bois and William Monroe Trotter. It was named for the "mighty current" of change the group wanted to effect and Niagara Falls, the Canadian side of which was where the first meeting took...

 in 1905——a precursor of the NAACP
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, usually abbreviated as NAACP, is an African-American civil rights organization in the United States, formed in 1909. Its mission is "to ensure the political, educational, social, and economic equality of rights of all persons and to...

.

It was declared a National Historic Landmark
National Historic Landmark
A National Historic Landmark is a building, site, structure, object, or district, that is officially recognized by the United States government for its historical significance...

in 1976.

The house is private and is not open to the public.

External links

  • http://www.nps.gov/history/nr/travel/civilrights/ma1.htm
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