11 11 The most bitter critic of Booker T. Washington was William Monroe Trotter (1872–1934). Born in Springfield Township, Ohio, Trotter received his B.A. degree from Harvard, graduating magna cum laude in 1895, and earned his M.A. from Harvard the following year. Trotter hated all forms of racial segregation and believed that Washington was nothing less than a traitor to his people. Trotter’s publication, the Boston Guardian, became a leading voice for black radicalism. With W. E. B. Du Bois he initiated the Niagara Movement in 1905. Trotter was active in the Negro American Political League from 1908 to 1913. Trotter’s confrontational style created as many enemies as friends, yet his ideas were instrumental in the development of the modern black freedom movement.
Under the caption, “Principal Washington Defines His Position,” the Tuskegee Student, the official organ of Tuskegee, prints the institute letter in which Mr. Washington said: “We cannot elevate and make useful a race of people unless there is held out to them the hope of reward for right living. Every revised constitution throughout the southern states has put a premium upon intelligence, ownership of property, thrift and character.” This little sheet begins by saying that the letter “appeared in all of the important papers of the country on Nov. 28. It has been unstintingly praised from one section of the country to the other for its clarity and forcefulness of statement, and for its ringing note of sincerity.” Although such words are to be expected from the employees of the school they are for the most part only too true. It is true that, although the letter was sent to the Age Herald of Birmingham, Alabama, it appeared simultaneously “in all the important papers of the country.” Then its effect must be admitted to have been greater than if any other Negro had written it, for admittedly no other Negro’s letter could have obtained such wide publicity. If it had in it aught that was injurious to the Negro’s welfare or to his manhood rights, therefore, such worked far more damage than if any other Negro or any other man, save the president himself, had written the words.
What man is there among us, whether friend or foe of the author of the letter, who was not astounded at the reference to the disfranchising constitutions quoted above. “Every revised constitution throughout the southern states has put a premium upon intelligence, ownership of property, thrift and character,” and all the more so because Mr. Washington had not been accused by even the southerners of opposing these disfranchising constitutions…. If the statement is false, if it is misleading, if it is injurious to the Negro, all the more blamable and guilty is the author because the statement was gratuitous on his part.
Is it the truth? Do these constitutions encourage Negroes to be thrifty, to be better and more intelligent? For this sort of argument is the most effective in favor of them…. Where is the Negro who says the law was or is ever intended to be fairly applied? … If so, then every reputable Negro orator and writer, from Hon. A. H. Grimke on, have been mistaken. If so, every Negro clergyman of standing, who has spoken on the subject … have been misinformed. We happen to know of an undertaker who has an enormous establishment in Virginia, who now can’t vote. Is that encouraging thrift? Two letter carriers, who have passed the civil service examinations, are now sueing because disfranchised. Is that encouraging intelligence? … Even a Republican candidate for governor in Virginia recently said Negro domination was to be feared if 10 Negroes could vote because they could have the balance of power. Mr. Washington’s statement is shamefully false and deliberately so.
But even were it true, what man is a worse enemy to a race than a leader who looks with equanimity on the disfranchisement of his race in a country where other races have universal suffrage by constitutions that make one rule for his race and another for the dominant race, by constitutions made by conventions to which his race is not allowed to send its representatives, by constitutions that his race although endowed with the franchise by law are not allowed to vote upon, and are, therefore, doubly illegal, by constitutions in violation to the national constitution, because, forsooth, he thinks such disfranchising laws will benefit the moral character of his people. Let our spiritual advisers condemn this idea of reducing a people to serfdom to make them good.
But what was the effect of Mr. Washington’s letter on the northern white people? …
No thinking Negro can fail to see that, with the influence Mr. Washington yields [wields] in the North and the confidence reposed in him by the white people on account of his school, a fatal blow has been given to the Negro’s political rights and liberty by his statement. The benevolence idea makes it all the more deadly in its effect. It comes very opportunely for the Negro, too, just when Roosevelt declares the Negro shall hold office, … when Congress is being asked to enforce the Negro’s constitutional rights, when these laws are being carried to the Supreme Court. And here Mr. Washington, having gained sufficient influence through his doctrines, his school and his elevation by the President, makes all these efforts sure of failure by killing public sentiment against the disfranchising constitutions.
And Mr. Washington’s word is the more effective for, discreditable as it may seem, not five Negro papers even mention a statement that belies all their editorials and that would have set aflame the entire Negro press of the country, if a less wealthy and less powerful Negro had made it. Nor will Negro orators nor Negro preachers dare now to pick up the gauntlet thrown down by the great “educator.” Instead of being universally repudiated by the Negro race his statement will be practically universally endorsed by its silence because Washington said it, though it sounds the death-knell of our liberty. The lips of our leading politicians are sealed, because, before he said it, Mr. Washington, through the President, put them under obligation to himself. Nor is there that heroic quality now in our race that would lead men to throw off the shackles of fear, of obligation, of policy and denounce a traitor though he be a friend, or even a brother. It occurs to none that silence is tantamount to being virtually an accomplice in the treasonable act of this Benedict Arnold of the Negro race.
O, for a black Patrick Henry to save his people from this stigma of cowardice; to rouse them from their lethargy to a sense of danger; to score the tyrant and to inspire his people with the spirit of those immortal words: “Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death.”
Source: Excerpt from editorial, Boston Guardian, December 20, 1902.
Stephen R. Fox, Guardian of Boston: William Monroe Trotter (New York: Atheneum, 1970).
August Meier, Negro Thought in America, 1880–1915 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1963).
William Jeremiah Moses, The Golden Age of Black Nationalism, 1850–1925 (New York: Archon Books, 1978).