The chief cook on the SS Yarmouth was more than pleased to hire “Will” as his new assistant, not just because Will could peel potatoes and cook but because he was also literate. Will knew how to write letters. And so it was that he not only got the job as second cook but also became the chief cook’s unofficial secretary. For Will, this was convenient and some might say that it may even have been part of a plan devised by the very resourceful Will. In fact, it was possible that on that long trip across the Atlantic in the ship’s galley every day, Will may have encouraged the cook to dictate letters to him—letters that would eventually have to be mailed at some port somewhere in France. For Will had only one thing on his mind: to somehow find his way to Paris.
When the small steamer reached its first French port, which was Le Havre, it did not immediately dock and the crew was ordered to stay on board. But the chief cook was so eager to get his letters in the mail that he asked his capable assistant to row ashore, mail the letters, and come back as quickly as possible. And so it was that Will concealed a small roll of money in his work clothes, rowed into the harbor, docked the dinghy, posted the letters, and never again saw the chief cook. After leaving his home in Boston, wandering the wharves of New York for nearly six weeks, obtaining a seaman’s permit, disguising himself as a cook, and peeling potatoes on the transatlantic voyage, William Monroe Trotter had finally reached the shores of France.
The next day he purchased a change of clothes and booked passage on a train to Paris. And by May 7, months after the State Department had denied his request for a passport, Trotter was in Paris. This was the very day that Clemenceau was handing a draft of the peace treaty to the German delegates at Versailles—a draft without any statement about racial equality, without even a line from the proposal Trotter had sent to President Wilson in December and again in the new year, without a word from Du Bois’s resolutions coming out of the Pan-African Congress, without even a mention of racial injustice or the problem of the color line and the need to address it in order to achieve world peace.
By the time Trotter finally got within walking distance of the great peace conference in Paris it was abundantly clear that the shaping and molding of the world was nearly complete. Who were the potters and what was the clay had already been decided. And no one in Trotter’s race would be counted among the potters.
With the preliminary peace treaty in the hands of the German delegates, what could Trotter do for his race now? For most people, this would have been the end of the battle. But not for Will, who was never afraid of a fight. This was simply the beginning of a new phase. It was also perhaps one of the greatest stories of determination, persistence, and dedication to the cause of equality that year.
At 8 P.M. Paris time on May 11, Trotter sent a cablegram to his newspaper, The Guardian in Boston, which published it in the May 16 issue. “Arrived Paris Wednesday sent protest [to] Versailles. Campaign to Begin. TROTTER.” “This trip,” The Guardian noted, “is Mr. Trotter’s greatest attempt and first great victory over President Wilson’s autocratic ruling [of blocking the passports]. We will watch with care to see what will be said now.”
During his first days in Paris, when he had no place to stay and little money, he found his way to the home of Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Kane, a black couple from Washington, D.C., living in Paris. A friend of Trotter’s, a Mr. Clark, also from Washington, had told him to look them up if he ever got to Paris.
It was late in the night when the unshaven, disheveled black man arrived at the Kane home. Anxious and exhausted, he rang the doorbell repeatedly, while the Kanes’ dog barked loudly on the other side of the door. When Mrs. Kane answered the door, she was already uncomfortable about who might be there. It was late and she did not know this man who told her his name was Mr. Clark. He had just arrived from Washington. Believing he must be an acquaintance of her husband’s, she let him in, though reluctantly.
“He was absolutely like a tramp,” she wrote in a letter to her sister-in-law in New York, “in rags, dirty, and in boots without soles.” He told her he was hungry and tired. And so she warmed some food for him and told him he could stay the night. He then decided to tell her the truth: that he was not Mr. Clark. However, Mr. Clark assured him that Trotter could use his name in Paris if it would help him get established. He then told her his real name and his real purpose. He had come to Paris to see President Wilson and Clemenceau “to protest against the way colored people are treated in America.”
The next day he met Kane and told him the story of his journey to Paris. He also asked if he could use Kane’s name to cable the United States for money. He needed clothes and a place to live. But so fantastic was Trotter’s story that Kane doubted it was true. He gave Trotter a cup of hot chocolate and asked him to come back later. Trotter left and did not return.
Trotter would continue to tell his story until he found someone who would listen and respond. And so, a few days later, he met a translator at a café, a man who was so taken by Trotter’s persistence and pluck that he offered Trotter part of his office space in an impressive building on the Place de la Bourse, at the hub of the high-end business district of Paris. He helped Trotter get outfitted to give a better impression and he even shared his secretarial staff. Someone else whom Trotter met through the translator referred him to the Hôtel du Bon Pasteur on the Rue Ste.-Anne, where he found a room and where he immediately began churning out press releases and petitions, seeking an audience with the president through all sorts of indirect channels and telegraphing his protests against the preliminary peace treaty directly to Wilson, Clemenceau, Foch, Lloyd George, Orlando, and Baron Makino of Japan. “Being informed that the world peace treaty ignores the petitions for abolition of the undemocratic color discrimination…” his missives began.
After a week of this, he had not heard a single word from the recipients. And so, in his usual unrelenting way, he sent the same telegram in English and in French with a cover letter dated May 15 and a list of his credentials—Harvard University graduate, first black Phi Beta Kappa in America, editor of a major black newspaper in Boston—to every delegate at the peace conference and to several French newspapers. He beseeched the delegates to read his protest, hoping they would “be able to see the imperative need of recognizing this claim of democracy.” He told them that he was now beginning his work “of letting the world know that the Negro race wants full liberty and equality of rights, as the fruit of the World War.”
Every newspaper in Paris would soon be writing about the black man from America who said he represented all black Americans in claiming the fulfillment of the promises made by the Allies during the Great War. And many would give him space, from a few inches to an entire column, to state his cause and to express those grievances that President Wilson never wanted to be heard beyond the shores of his own nation. Within ten days of Trotter’s arrival in Paris, a reporter from the newspaper L’Avenir dined with him and wrote about it, despite the language barrier. Trotter was still struggling with French and the reporter’s English was not all that good, but they met without the translator, who usually accompanied Trotter now.
In the style of a social column, the reporter began his piece, “Monsieur William M. Trotter, mouthpiece of 14 millions of Negroes of the U.S. arrived in Paris the other day.” Describing Trotter as a man with an “intelligent face, full of ardor,” he chronicled Trotter’s every move since his arrival in Paris and at the dinner that night. Trotter’s meal consisted of escalope of veal with fried potatoes and café au lait. Between bites he talked about how much less democratic Wilson was at home than in Europe and about how urgent the “lamentable situation” in America was. “Assuredly,” Trotter told the reporter, “there would be, if we do not obtain justice, a revolution of the Negroes of America and after that revolution, sir, then there will be peace.”
In the article, which was published in the May 22 edition of L’Avenir, the reporter’s response to this statement was glib: “‘Exactly,’ I said to him, and then Monsieur lighted suddenly with a fire half mystical and said to me: ‘This will be the peace of the world—the perpetual peace’ with his bright eyes suddenly illumined with that profound light that the early Christians of the olden times must have had a very long time ago when they repeated with candor the phrase of the Apostle, quite new then: ‘the Kingdom of God will reign again upon the Earth.’”
Another French publication, Le Petit Journal, talked of Trotter’s persistence and his insistent petitions and pleas to the peace conference delegates. It told the story of Wilson’s refusal to issue passports to black Americans. “Mr. Trotter alone sailed in disguise,” the article said. And, “his protestation brings to light the inferior situation of the men of his race in the U.S. and the promises which were made to them during the war, promises which, he said, have not been kept.”
And in late May a letter to the editor of the magazine L’Intransigeant described the new polished Trotter entering his office for a meeting wearing a black cutaway coat and trousers, a vest, patent-leather-tipped shoes, and white collar and black tie. As he sat down, the letter noted, he removed his derby hat, drew the gloves from his hands, laid his cane and black leather portfolio on the desk, shook hands, and greeted his guests. “This is the William Monroe Trotter of Paris,” the article read.
The Wilson administration was not so impressed. The State Department had refused passports to the black delegates chosen in December of 1918 to represent Trotter’s National Equal Rights League because the Wilson administration feared precisely what was happening now. Trotter even referred to himself publicly as NERL’s elected delegate to Paris and thus was officially authorized to be there on behalf of his race, no matter what Wilson or the State Department might say or do. For Trotter to be in Paris and to be telling every French newspaper about shameful conditions in America, even saying there could be a revolution soon, was simply unconscionable and unbearable to the administration. Under no circumstances whatsoever would Wilson meet with Trotter. But Trotter would not accept Wilson’s refusal “under any circumstances.”
On the afternoon of May 30, President Wilson was at Suresnes outside Paris dedicating a new American cemetery. Thousands had gathered on this hot, sunny day, which was Memorial Day in America. A reverent crowd, consisting mostly of American soldiers and the families of deceased French soldiers, stood amid acacia groves on a hillside overlooking Paris. There were also diplomats and generals and statesmen, looking out upon the rows of American dead, and waiting for the American president to speak. Among the throng were Ray Stannard Baker and William Monroe Trotter.
Although weary from the daily battles in which his adversaries were lowering his high purposes for the treaty, Wilson proceeded to give a speech that Baker later described as having come out of “the volcanic depths of his being.” With a powerful mix of grace and conviction, he spoke of the cause for which the soldiers had fought. Everyone there that day, he said, had a duty to see to it that such a cause was not betrayed. “They came to defeat forever the things for which the Central powers stood, the sort of power they meant to assert in the world, the arrogant, selfish dominance which they meant to establish; and they came, moreover, to see to it that there should never be a war like this again. It is for us, particularly for us who are civilians, to use our proper weapons of counsel and agreement to see to it that there never is such a war again.”
Wilson’s last words brought tears to his quiet, rapt audience: “I sent these lads over here to die. Shall I—can I—ever speak a word of counsel which is inconsistent with the assurances I gave them when they came over? Here stand I, consecrated in spirit to the men who were once my comrades and who are now gone, and who have left me under eternal bonds of fidelity.”
Baker was moved tremendously by the speech. It came at a time when he could see only iniquities and deceptions at the peace conference and when he had wanted his president to fight even harder for what he believed the treaty must be. Wilson’s words that day bolstered his own resolve and renewed his commitment. “I saw and felt a great soul struggling with the bleakest forces of his time,” Baker wrote.
Trotter, however, heard only hypocrisy. In response, he sent this letter to President Wilson and also to every newspaper in Paris:
Sir: Lawlessness and mob murder against citizens of color continue to take place in our country, the U.S.A. This was so while the world peace agreement was being written. Day before yesterday while the Entente Allies were waiting for the peace treaty to be signed by Germany, a man of color was taken by the mob from the courthouse itself in the State of Missouri and lynched in the courthouse yard after the court had decided that life imprisonment was the punishment due the victim.
Yesterday here in France, in your Memorial Day address at the graves of American soldiers, you declared: “I stand consecrated to the lads sent here to die.” Many of them were lads of color, gallant and loyal; fighting for France, for civilization and for world democracy. Will you, therefore, for their sakes and that they shall have not died in vain, grant to their kin and race at home protection of right and life in the world peace agreement? And will you not at once send a special message to Congress recommending that lynching be made a crime against the Federal Government?
Yours, sir, for world democracy, William Trotter.
Back in America on May 30, a mob of unmasked white men in Arkansas abducted a black farm hand, Frank Livingston, from his home and burned him alive. Livingston, a soldier in the Great War, had gotten into an argument with a white farmer about some chickens. The farmer began shooting at Livingston. In self-defense, the black man grabbed an ax and struck the farmer, who died instantly. The farmer’s wife then took the gun and shot at Livingston, who then killed her also with his ax. The idea of self-defense never registered with the mob, which, before thrusting Livingston onto a bonfire, tied him to a tree and stabbed him repeatedly with butcher knives and shards of glass from broken liquor bottles.
That day in New York, the play The Noose started its fifth week of performances. Set in Georgia, the play tells the story of a prominent lawyer who is absent from his home on Christmas Eve when his wife and their child return from a visit with his mother-in-law. The black handyman tells the wife that a “lynching bee” is taking place that night. She suddenly suspects that her husband might be part of it and she confronts him when he comes home. He admits to being a member of the lynching party. This provokes a fierce debate over the issue of lynchings. The wife soon learns that he was not only part of the mob but also had tied the noose. And she finds out that her husband’s political connections, the ones backing him for his planned run for governor, are part of the same gang. She then gives him an ultimatum: either he condemns lynching or she and their child will leave. Taking such a stand will, of course, put an end to his gubernatorial campaign. He cannot give up the political opportunity and so the play ends with the wife and child leaving the house.
Reviewers commented that the play seemed contrived. It was their understanding that wives, mothers, daughters, and sisters did not condemn lynchings; rather they attended them. Besides, one critic wrote, “There are few, if any, cases on record in which happy couples have become separated because the husband was an acknowledged lyncher.”