Rube Foster was an American baseball player who gained fame as a pitcher, manager, and owner and is known as the “father of Black baseball” after founding the 1920 Negro National League (NNL), the first successful professional league for African American ballplayers. At the age of 18, he had begun playing semiprofessional baseball in Texas for the Waco Yellow Jackets. In 1902, he joined Frank Leland’s Chicago Union Giants and then, left to play in an integrated semiprofessional league in Michigan. He had an impressive career as a player and eventually joined with businessman John Schorling to form the Chicago American Giants. The American Giants, led by Foster as player, manager, and owner, played at South Side Park and became one of the greatest teams in the history of Black baseball, winning Negro league championships in 1914, 1915, and 1917. In Kansas City, Missouri, in 1920, Foster met with seven other owners of African American baseball clubs for the purpose of establishing the NNL. As chief executive of the NNL, he curtailed the excessive trading of players to establish some parity of talent between the clubs. Foster was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1981.
Booker T. Washington is one of the most controversial and dominant figures in African American history. He was born enslaved on April 5, 1856 in Hale’s Ford, Virginia. His mother’s name was Jane and his father was a White man from a nearby plantation. At the age of nine, Washington was freed from slavery and moved to West Virginia. He had always been known as simply “Booker” until he decided to add the name “Washington” after feeling the pressure to have two names when he started grammar school. At the age of 16, Washington began college at the Hampton Normal and Agriculture Institute in Hampton, Virginia. He also attended Wayland Seminary from 1878 to 1879 before returning to teach at Hampton. As a result of a recommendation from Hampton officials, he became the first principal of Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute (now Tuskegee University), which opened on July 4, 1881; he remained in this capacity for 34 years until his death in 1915. As the principal of Tuskegee Institute, Washington used the platform to practice his educational philosophy and theory concerning the advancement of African Americans. Washington’s contributions to African American advancement, such as his programs for rural extension work and his help in the development of the National Negro Business League, are numerous as well as his accolades.
An 1866 law authorized the U.S. Army to form cavalry and infantry regiments of Black men, which led to the units, the 9th and 10th cavalries and the 38th through 41st infantries. The law required their officers were White. These Black soldiers helped protect the nation’s westward expansion by building roads and participating in significant military actions, such as the Red River War (1874-1875) and the Battle of San Juan Hill during the Spanish American War (1898). Buffalo soldier was a nickname given to members of the cavalry regiments of the U.S. Army by the Native Americans they were fighting. They also served among the first national park rangers. Black soldiers used military service as a strategy to obtain equal rights as citizens. Paradoxically, they sought to achieve this by engaging in government-led wars meant to overtake the Southwest and Great Plains from Native Americans.
Claude McKay was a Jamaican-born poet and novelist whose “Home to Harlem” (1928) was the most popular novel written by an American Black at that time. After attending Tuskegee Institute (1912) and Kansas State Teachers College (1912–14), McKay went to New York in 1914, where he contributed regularly to The Liberator, then a leading journal of avant-garde politics and art. The shock of American racism turned him from the conservatism of his youth. With the publication of two volumes of poetry, “Spring in New Hampshire” (1920) and “Harlem Shadows” (1922), McKay emerged as the first and most militant voice of the Harlem Renaissance. After 1922, he lived successively in the Soviet Union, France, Spain, and Morocco. In both “Home to Harlem” and “Banjo” (1929), he attempted to capture the vitality and essential health of the uprooted Black vagabonds of urban America and Europe. McKay advocated full civil liberties and racial solidarity. In 1940, he became a U.S. citizen and in 1942, he converted to Roman Catholicism and worked with a Catholic youth organization until his death. He wrote for various magazines and newspapers, including the New Leader and the New York Amsterdam News.
Daniel Hale Williams III was born on January 18, 1856, in Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania, to Sarah Price Williams and Daniel Hale Williams II. The couple had several children, with the elder Daniel H. Williams inheriting a barber business. After his father died, a 10-year-old Daniel was sent to live in Baltimore, Maryland, with family friends. He became a shoemaker’s apprentice but disliked the work and decided to return to his family, who had moved to Illinois. Like his father, he took up barbering, but ultimately decided he wanted to pursue his education. He worked as an apprentice with Dr. Henry Palmer, a highly accomplished surgeon, and then completed further training at Chicago Medical College. Williams pursued a pioneering career in medicine. An African American doctor, in 1891, Williams opened Provident Hospital, the first medical facility to have an interracial staff. He was also one of the first physicians to successfully complete pericardial surgery on a patient. Williams later became chief surgeon of the Freedmen’s Hospital.
Anna Julia Haywood Cooper was a writer, teacher, and activist who championed education for African Americans and women. She was the daughter of an enslaved woman, Hannah Stanley, and her owner, George Washington Haywood. In 1867, two years after the end of the Civil War, she began her formal education at Saint Augustine’s Normal School and Collegiate Institute, a coeducational facility built for former slaves. There she received the equivalent of a high school education. She attended Oberlin College in Ohio on a tuition scholarship, earning a BA in 1884 and a Masters in Mathematics in 1887. After graduation Cooper worked at Wilberforce University and Saint Augustine’s before moving to Washington, D.C. to teach at Washington Colored High School. She met another teacher, Mary Church (Terrell), who, along with Cooper, boarded at the home of Alexander Crummell, a prominent clergyman, intellectual, and proponent of African American emigration to Liberia. Cooper published her first book, “A Voice from the South by a Black Woman of the South,” in 1892. In addition to calling for equal education for women, A Voice from the South advanced Cooper’s assertion that educated African American women were necessary for uplifting the entire Black race.
Edmonia Lewis was one of the first African American sculptors. Lewis was a mixed woman, her father, African American and her mother, Chippewa Indian. She was orphaned when she was five-years-old and lived with her mother’s tribe until she was 12-years-old. Her older brother, Sunrise, moved to California where he became a gold miner and later financed Lewis’ schooling, where she eventually attended Oberlin College in Ohio in 1859. While at Oberlin, she dropped her Chippewa name “Wildfire” and took the name Mary Edmonia Lewis. Unfortunately, her career at Oberlin ended when she was accused of poisoning two of her White roommates. Lewis left Oberlin in 1863 and, eventually met portrait sculptor, Edward Brackett and studied sculpting under him. She began making medallion portraits of abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison, Charles Sumner and Wendell Phillips. Lewis’ sales of her portrait busts of abolitionist John Brown and Colonel Robert Gould Shaw financed her first trip to Europe in 1865. After traveling, she settled in Rome where she rented a studio. She learned Italian and became acquainted with two prominent White Americans, actress Charlotte Cushman and sculptor, Harriet Hosmer. Lewis did most of her work without assistance. She was known for her portrait busts of abolitionists and subjects depicting her dual African-American and Native American ancestry. She also completed several mythological subjects such as “Asleep,” “Awake,” and “Poor Cupid,” and three religious subjects, including a lost “Adoration of the Magi” of 1883, and copies of Italian Renaissance sculpture. Her “Moses,” which was copied after Michelangelo, is an example of Lewis’s imitative talents and “Hagar” (also known as Hagar in the Wilderness) is probably the masterpiece among her known surviving works.
George Washington Carver was born near Diamond Grove, Missouri (his exact birthdate is not known). His parents were the slaves of Moses Carver, which is where he received the name, Carver. He was orphaned as a baby–his mother was kidnapped and his father died. He was later exchanged for a racehorse, and by the age of 13-years-old, he was on his own. He learned to read and write, and received a high school education despite tremendous obstacles, and was eventually the first Black student at Simpson College in Indianola, Iowa and later, Iowa State Agricultural College. Young Carver showed a keen interest and a healthy attitude for growing things and for science, and he would often care for sick plants. In Iowa College, while working as a janitor, he earned his bachelor’s degree in agricultural science in 1894, and two years later, he earned his master’s degree from the same college. He would eventually become a faculty member at the same college. His scholarship in agricultural sciences was so amazing and well known that Booker T. Washington offered him a position at the famous Tuskegee Institute in 1896. He accepted and moved to Alabama. He became the director of its agricultural research facility, and persuaded many Southern farmers to plant peanuts, sweet potatoes, and other crops instead of cotton because cotton was eroding and destroying the soil. Back then, his approach to crop diversification and soil conversation was revolutionary and radical. He was one of the pioneers of the use of legumes to replace soil minerals depleted by the unchecked growing of cotton. His agricultural discoveries and their techniques, particularly improving the land and diversifying the foundations of the South’s economy were his major contribution and most impactful work. He also made international news by making scouring powder from calcareous tripoli and siliceous tripoli. His research programs yielded 300 derivative from peanuts and about 118 from sweet potato. Carver even made synthetic marble from wood pulp.
Black Nationalist, repatriationist, and minister, Henry M. Turner was 31 years old at the time of the Emancipation. Turner was born in 1834 in Newberry Courthouse, South Carolina to free Black parents Sarah Greer and Hardy Turner. The self-taught Turner by the age of fifteen worked as a janitor at a law firm in Abbeville, South Carolina. The firm’s lawyers noted his abilities and helped with his education. However, Turner was attracted to the church and after being converted during a Methodist religious revival, decided to become a minister. He joined the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church and became a licensed minister in 1853 at the age of 19. Turner soon became an itinerant evangelist traveling as far as New Orleans, Louisiana. One of the most influential African American leaders in late-nineteenth-century Georgia, he was a pioneering church organizer and missionary for the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME) in Georgia, later rising to the rank of bishop. Turner was also an active politician and Reconstruction-era state legislator from Macon. Later in life, he became an outspoken advocate of back-to-Africa emigration.
Henry Ossawa Tanner was an American painter who gained international acclaim for his depiction of landscapes and biblical themes. Tanner began an art career in earnest in 1876, painting harbour scenes, landscapes, and animals from the Philadelphia Zoo. In 1880, he began two years of formal study under Thomas Eakins at Philadelphia’s prestigious Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA), where he was the only African American. In 1888, he moved to Atlanta to open a photography studio, but the venture failed. With the help of Joseph C. Hartzell, a bishop from Cincinnati, Ohio, Tanner secured a teaching position at Clark University in Atlanta. In 1890, Hartzell arranged an exhibition of Tanner’s works in Cincinnati and, when no paintings sold, Hartzell purchased the entire collection himself. Through these earnings, Tanner traveled to Paris in 1891 to enroll at the Académie Julian. He returned to the United States in 1893, in part to deliver a paper on African Americans and art at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. By 1894, his paintings were being exhibited at the annual Paris Salon, at which in 1896 he was awarded an honourable mention for “Daniel in the Lions’ Den” (1895; this version lost). “The Raising of Lazarus” (c. 1897), also biblical in theme, won a medal at the Paris Salon of 1897, a rare achievement for an American artist. Later that year the French government purchased the painting.
Activist and writer Ida B. Wells-Barnett first became prominent in the 1890s because she brought international attention to the lynching of African Americans in the South. Born into slavery in Mississippi, Wells became a schoolteacher and created the first kindergarten for Black children. She settled on Chicago’s South Side in 1894 after her life was threatened. Also known by her married name, Ida B. Wells-Barnett became an investigative journalist who crusaded against the lynching of Black people. In 1892, she published a pamphlet, “Southern Horrors,” which detailed her findings. Through her lectures and books such as “A Red Record” (1895), Wells countered the “rape myth” used by lynch mobs to justify the murder of African Americans. Through her research she found that lynch victims had challenged White authority or had successfully competed with Whites in business or politics. Wells-Barnett also worked to advance other political causes such as the exclusion of African Americans from the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, and three years later, she helped launch the National Association of Colored Women (NACW). In 1909, Wells was a founding member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). She also actively campaigned for women’s suffrage. When approved, the 19 Amendment mostly benefited White women.
Isaac Burns Murphy is celebrated as one of the greatest jockeys ever. According to Murphy’s calculation, he won 628 of his 1,212 starts in a career that lasted from 1875 to 1895. In later years, his count number was recalculated, changing his numbers to 530 wins in 1,538 rides, putting his win rate at 34 percent. Murphy was born in Frankford, Kentucky, in 1861 to his father a free Black man and bricklayer and his mother, a laundrywoman. After moving to Lexington after the death of his father in the Civil War, his mother worked at the Richard and Owings Racing Stable, where he would go to work with her. A Black trainer named Eli Jordon noticed Murphy’s interest in race horses, and began to train him for his first race, when Murphy was only 14-years-old. He won his first race in 1875 at the Lexington Crab Orchard and, a year later, he had won 11 races at Lexington’s Kentucky Association track. The following year, he placed fourth in his first Kentucky Derby race. By 1879, he was a star in the sport with a win at the Travers Stakes in Saratoga Springs. Over the course of his racing career, he received an average salary of close to $20,000 per year. At the time, Murphy was the highest paid athlete in the United States, and he lived in a mansion in Lexington. The National Museum of Racing and Hall of Fame was created in 1955, and Murphy was the first jockey inducted.
Boxer Jack Johnson was born in Galveston, Texas, in 1878. In 1908, he became the first African American to win the world heavyweight crown when he knocked out the reigning champ, Tommy Burns. During Johnson’s era, boxing was one of the most popular sports, along with baseball and horse racing. A Black man reigning as champion gave pride to Black people across the nation, and enraged White America. Johnson’s boxing style was patient and defensive in the early rounds, and over the course of the fight he became more aggressive. His style involved him avoiding his opponents punches and then strike with swift counters. By 1902, he had won at least 50 fights against both White and Black opponents. He won his first title in 1903, when he won the World Colored Heavyweight Championship, but he was unable to become the world heavyweight champion because James J. Jeffries, the White champion, refused to fight him. At that time period, Black and White boxers fought in competitions, but never for the world heavyweight championship, which was only for White fighters. Johnson did not get his chance at the world heavy weight title until 1908, when he defeated Tommy Burns in Sydney, Australia. Whites in America were so enraged that a Black man held the title that there was a call for a “Great White Hope” to defeat Johnson. In 1910, former undefeated heavyweight champion Jeffries came out of retirement because he felt obligated to the public to reclaim the title for the White race. The fight took place on July 4 in front of 20,000 people in Reno, Nevada, and was billed as “The Fight of the Century.” In the 15th round, Jeffries had been knocked down twice, the first knockdowns of his career. His corner men stopped the fight before Johnson could knock him out. Johnson’s victory caused race riots all over the country.
James Weldon Johnson was a lawyer, a United States consul in a foreign nation, and served an important role in combating racism through his position in the NAACP. Johnson was born in Jacksonville, Florida. His father was a headwaiter at a hotel and his mother was a teacher at the segregated Stanton School. Johnson attended Stanton until he entered high school. He attended high school and college at Atlanta University, where he received his bachelor’s in 1894. After college, Johnson pursued several endeavors including being a principal of Stanton School, studying the law under and writing poetry and songs. In 1901, Johnson decided to pursue a career in writing with his brother, John Rosamond Johnson. They achieved success with the composition of around two hundred songs for Broadway. While in New York, Johnson also became involved in politics. In 1904, he served as treasurer for the Colored Republican Club. In 1906, the Roosevelt Administration appointed Johnson as the United States consul in Puerto Cabello, Venezuela. In 1909, he served as consul in Corinto, Nicaragua until 1913. In addition to his service as consul, during this time, Johnson anonymously published his novel, “The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man” (1912). After leaving the public sector, in 1916, Johnson accepted the position of field secretary for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Johnson worked at opening new branches and expanding membership. In 1920, the NAACP appointed him executive secretary. In this position, he was able to bring attention to racism, lynching, and segregation.
Prominent educator and college president John Hope was born on August 2, 1868 in Augusta, Georgia. His father, James Hope, was a Scottish immigrant and his mother, Mary Frances Butts, was a Black woman, who had been free prior to the Emancipation Proclamation. Hope attended Worchester Academy in Massachusetts and graduated in 1890. He continued his studies at Brown University. After graduating in 1894, Hope spent four years teaching science at Roger Williams University in Nashville, Tennessee, before accepting a position at Atlanta Baptist College (later Morehouse University). Meanwhile, Hope met Lugenia Burns in Chicago and married her in 1897. Burns was already beginning her career as a race leader and community activist. In 1906, Hope became the first Black President of Morehouse University and then the President of Atlanta University in 1929 when Morehouse merged with it. His presidency at each institution signaled a shift from White-led to Black-led institutions. He strove to create a university that would prepare young Black men and women for the civil rights struggle awaiting them.
Lewis Howard Latimer was an inventor and draftsman best known for his contributions to the patenting of the light bulb and the telephone. Latimer was born in Chelsea, Massachusetts, on September 4, 1848. He was the youngest of four children born to George and Rebecca Latimer, who had escaped from slavery in Virginia six years before his birth. In 1864, at the age of 16-years-old, he lied about his age in order to enlist in the United States Navy during the Civil War. Returning to Boston after an honorable discharge, he accepted a menial position at the Crosby and Gould patent law office. He taught himself mechanical drawing and drafting by observing the work of draftsmen at the firm. Recognizing Latimer’s talent and promise, the firm partners promoted him from office boy to draftsman. In addition to assisting others, Latimer designed a number of his own inventions, including an improved railroad car bathroom and an early air conditioning unit. Latimer’s talents saw a large number of scientific and engineering breakthroughs. He was directly involved with one of these inventions: the telephone. Working with Bell, Latimer helped draft the patent for Bell’s design of the telephone. He was also involved in the field of incandescent lighting, working for Hiram Maxim and Edison.
Maggie Lena Walker was the first Black woman to charter a bank in the U.S., opening St. Luke Penny Savings Bank, where she served as president. She was born to Elizabeth Draper Mitchell, a former slave and a White man, Eccles Cuthbert. Early in her life, her mother married William Mitchell who was also a former slave. Her parents worked in the home of an abolitionist and after a few years of exemplary service, they were freed. Maggie’s stepfather (Mitchell) got a job as a “maitre d” at a prominent hotel and the family moved into a small house nearby. She attended Lancaster School and then the Armstrong Normal School, where she graduated in 1883. At age 14-years-old, she became a member of the Grand United Order of St. Luke, an African-American fraternal and cooperative insurance society that had been founded in 1867 by a former slave, Mary Prout, in Baltimore. She taught at her alma mater, the Lancaster School, until her marriage in 1886 to Armstead Walker, Jr., a building contractor. After having three sons, she went to work part time as an agent for an insurance company, the Women’s Union, while attending night school for bookkeeping. She also volunteered at St. Luke and eventually worked her way up in 1889, to become the executive secretary-treasurer of the renamed organization, the Independent Order of St. Luke. Walker started publishing the St. Luke Herald in 1902 to publicize and promote the order. In 1903, she opened the St. Luke Penny Savings Bank and became its first president. She earned the recognition of being the first women to charter a bank in the United States. The bank severed relations with St. Luke fraternal order and then merged with two other Black banks to form the Consolidated Bank and Trust Company. She became the chairwoman of the board. Walker supported many charities and organization that worked to better the quality of life of Black people such as the Urban League, the Virginia Interracial Committee and the NAACP.
Mary Eliza Church Terrell was a well-known African American activist who championed racial equality and women’s suffrage in the late 19th and early 20th century. She was born to former slaves, her father, Robert Reed Church, was a successful businessman who became one of the South’s first African American millionaires and her mother, Louisa Ayres Church, owned a hair salon. Terrell was born on September 23, 1863 in Memphis, Tennessee. Their affluence and belief in the importance of education enabled Terrell to attend the Antioch College laboratory school in Ohio, and later Oberlin College, where she earned both Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees. Terrell spent two years teaching at Wilburforce College before moving to Washington DC, in 1887 to teach at the M Street Colored High School. Her activism was sparked in 1892, when an old friend, Thomas Moss, was lynched in Memphis by Whites because his business competed with theirs. Terrell joined Ida B. Wells-Barnett in anti-lynching campaigns, but her life work focused on the notion of racial uplift, the belief that Blacks would help end racial discrimination by advancing themselves and other members of the race through education, work, and community activism. In 1896, she helped found the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) and was president from 1896 to 1901. She also actively embraced women’s suffrage, which she saw as essential to elevating the status of Black women, and consequently, the entire race. She actively campaigned for Black women’s suffrage.
Paul Laurence Dunbar is a U.S. author whose is known for his verse and short stories written in Black dialect. He was the first Black writer in the U.S. to make a concerted attempt to live by his writings and one of the first to attain national prominence. His parents were former slaves; his father escaped to freedom in Canada and then returned to the U.S. to fight in the Civil War. Dunbar was the only Black student in his Dayton high school, where he was the popular editor of the school paper. He published his first volume of poetry, “Oak and Ivy” (1893), at his own expense while working as an elevator operator and sold copies to his passengers to pay for the printing. His second volume, “Majors and Minors” (1895), attracted the favorable notice and his next book, “Lyrics of Lowly Life” (1896), which contained some of the finest verses of the first two volumes.
Scott Joplin was born near Texarkana, Texas, in 1868 to his father, an ex-slave from North Carolina and his mother, a freeborn woman from Kentucky. His mother worked with a family as a domestic worker. When she would take Joplin with her, he was able to play the family’s piano. He taught himself to play by sight and improvisation, and received some guidance from friends. A German immigrant music teacher heard Joplin play, and was so impressed that he gave him music lessons for free. The music teacher exposed Joplin to various forms of European music, such as folk and opera. Joplin was also heavily influenced by gospel hymns, spirituals, dance music, and work songs. During his teenage years he played at church gatherings and at social events, and he became known as a musical genius who did not need a piece of music to go by, and he could make up his own music. His first hit came when he moved to Sedalia, where he worked at the Maple Leaf Club and the Black 400. In 1899, he sold his “Maple Leaf Rag” to a Sedalia music publisher. The piece was an immediate hit and ragtime’s first popular piece. The piece influenced hundreds of “rags” written by other composers. Joplin was dubbed the “King of Ragtime” for his unique compositions and amazing ability to improvise on the piano. He composed forty-four ragtime pieces, one ragtime ballet, and two operas.
“W.C.” Handy was called the Father of the Blues and was born in Florence, Alabama, the son of a minister. He learned the rudiments of music while still in junior high school and began arranging for church choirs. His father dissuaded him from any “sinful” music and directed his talent towards church groups. When he was eighteen-years-old, he left home and headed for Chicago. His rendition of the blues was mixed with secular music that grew out of his association with farm hands, laborers, railroad workers, woodcutters. His spirituals, however, focused on higher ideals and dealt with personal relationships, freedom and the joyful things in life. He studied at Kentucky Music College, was the music instructor and bandmaster at Alabama A&M College and toured the U.S., Canada, Mexico and Cuba. He started as a cornetist, mingled with an assortment of musical groups and eventually became bandleader of the Mahara’s Minstrel Band. At the turn of the twentieth century, he organized and led military and dance bands in Mississippi, then moved to Memphis, Tennessee where he formed the Pace and Handy Music Company with lyricist, Harry Pace. The company became a booking agent for other bands, and a publishing agent for Handy’s musical compositions. This created an African American control of African American music and entertainment in the Memphis area. The first composition Handy published was Memphis Blues that was done earlier for a political campaign and was originally entitled, “Mr. Crump.” Next came St. Louis Blues, which was an instant success and it became his signature musical piece. He went on to write over sixty songs about the Blues, that he became known as the “Father of the Blues.” He also composed Aframerican Hymn, Blue Destiny, a symphonic piece, and about 150 other compositions, both sacred and secular.
William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was an American civil rights activist, leader, Pan-Africanist, sociologist, educator, historian, writer, editor, poet, and scholar. He was born and raised in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. In 1905, Du Bois was a founder and general secretary of the Niagara Movement, an African American protest group of scholars and professionals. In 1909, he was among the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and from 1910 to 1934, served it as director of publicity and research, a member of the board of directors, and founder and editor of The Crisis, its monthly magazine. Du Bois’s life and work were a mixture of scholarship, protest activity, and polemics. All of his efforts were geared toward gaining equal treatment for Black people in a world dominated by Whites to refute the myths of racial inferiority.
William Monroe Trotter was born in Chillicothe, Ohio to James Munroe Trotter, and Virginia Isaac Trotter. He was an honor student in Hyde Park High School, where he graduated in 1890. He went to Harvard University, where he received his bachelor’s degree magna cum laude and he was elected to the Phi Beta Kappa fraternity during his junior year. Trotter worked as an insurance agent, a real estate broker and eventually moved into mortgage funding. His early career choices were merely stepping stones towards publishing his own newspaper. He founded the Boston Guardian to urge Black people to stay on the front lines in defense of their rights. The publication took a strong stand against discrimination based on color and the treatment of Blacks as second-class citizens. As the Guardian became a successful national newspaper, Trotter’s name and his national stature rose with it. He was often called upon to speak before large audiences and had unfettered access to the White House. He joined W.E.B. Dubois in forming the Niagara Movement, the forerunner of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). He objected to any White financing or leadership for the new organization. The newly-formed organization and the recently-founded publication formed a natural partnership fighting for the same causes and traveling parallel paths of protest.
