Charles W. Chesnutt to William Monroe Trotter, 3 March 1932
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March 3, 1932
Mr. Wm. Monroe Trotter,
Editor The Guardian
56 Pemberton Sq., Room 11,
Boston, Mass.
My dear Mr. Trotter:
I have appreciated very much your courtesy in keeping me on your subscription list, and enclose a small check by way of aknowledgment.1 I wish it were five times as large, but, alas! I am up to my ears in debt, and find it difficult to live and pay the interest on my loans.2
I admire your courage and persistence in a cause which sometimes seems almost hopeless, but which, in the course of time, will no doubt work out all right.
Cordially yours, CWC:MKCorrespondent: William Monroe Trotter (1872–1934) was a Black activist and journalist whose father had been one of the most prominent Black Democrats of his time. Educated at Harvard and mostly active in Boston, Masachusetts, Trotter was an outspoken critic of Booker T. Washington. He co-founded the newspaper The Guardian (Boston) and the Boston Literary and Historical Association, using both to criticize White racism in the U.S. and accommodationism among Blacks. Although initially allied with W. E. B. Du Bois and active in the Niagara Movement, which was instrumental in founding the NAACP, Trotter later distanced himself from the group and founded a more radical alternative, the National Equal Rights League.
1. The Boston-based Guardian, the weekly Black newspaper which William Monroe Trotter (1872–1934) had edited and published since 1901, had floundered for approximately 15 years, but in early 1932 again went bankrupt. Trotter and his sister and assistant editor Maude Trotter Steward (1875–1955) wrote to many subscribers for additional support. See Kerri K. Greenidge, Black Radical: The Life and Times of William Monroe Trotter (New York: W.W. Norton, 2020), 347. [back]
2. Many of Chesnutt's letters from 1932 make clear that he, like many small investors of the time, had been financially ruined by the stock market crash of 1929 and its aftermath. By 1932, William Monroe Trotter was in a similar position; in 1931, he had been forced to sell his house and move the Guardian offices from prestigious Tremont Row in the city center to Boston's South End. [back]
