Kicha's photos with the keyword: The Guardian

From the early 1890s until the early 1900s, George W. Forbes owned and edited two African-American newspapers in Boston, Massachusetts. Through them, he developed a local and national reputation as a proponent of full rights of citizenship for African Americans in the United States. George Washington Forbes was born in Shannon, Mississippi, in 1864 (the exact date is unknown), just before the end of the Civil War. His parents had been enslaved and must have encouraged him to follow his desire to study and leave Mississippi. For a while, Forbes, who probably received little education in Mississippi, worked at labor jobs and on farms. Sometime around 1878, he left Mississippi permanently, traveling first to Ohio, where he studied for a while at Wilberforce University. In the mid-1880s, Forbes moved to Boston. For three or four years, he worked as a laborer at Harvard University. Having saved enough money to continue his education, he left Boston in 1888 to enroll in Amherst College. He graduated from Amherst in 1892, his graduation was attended by a friend he had met in Boston, W. E. B. DuBois, who would later become one of the most important African American leaders of his day. After graduation, Forbes returned to Boston. He became a member of an informal group of black Boston activists, known as the "radicals," whose most prominent member was William Monroe Trotter. In the autumn after his graduation, Forbes founded the Boston Courant, the second African-American newspaper in Boston. Knowing that he would not be making much money as an editor of a fledgling newspaper, Forbes also worked as a librarian at the Boston Public Library. Forbes edited the Courant for five years. When the Courant folded in 1897 as a result of financial problems, Forbes kept working at his library job while he waited to see whether he and his friends could found another newspaper to take the Courant's place. In 1901, he and Trotter founded the Guardian, through which Forbes quickly made a name for himself by writing editorials that attacked Booker Taliaferro Washington, the most prominent African-American leader of that time. Forbes and his partner Trotter took issue with Washington's forgiving stance toward racist laws that segregated African Americans from whites in public places and made it difficult for blacks to vote. Both men believed that a much more confrontational style opposing such laws was needed and faulted Washington as too timid. In November of 1900, Forbes married Marie Elizabeth Harley of Kingston, New York. After a personal dispute between Forbes and Trotter in 1903, Forbes left the paper. He participated to a small degree with his old friend W. E. B. DuBois in the founding of the Niagara Movement, the forerunner of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). However, from about 1910 Forbes withdrew from politics and devoted himself to working at the Boston Public Library and writing a book, which was never published, about African-American literature. George Forbes died on March 10, 1927. Sources: Extant Collections of Early Black Newspapers: A Research Guide to the Black Press, 1880–1915, with an Index to the Boston Guardian, 1902–1904 by Georgetta Merritt Campbell, Troy, NY, Whitston, 1981; African-Americans in Boston: More than 350 Years by Robert C. Hayden (1992)

William Monroe Trotter was a Harvard-educated journalist and activist who championed equal rights for African Americans. William Monroe Trotter was born on April 7, 1872, in Chillicothe, Ohio, and raised in Hyde Park, Boston. His father, James, was a writer and former civil rights lieutenant who worked in real estate. Trotter excelled in academics growing up, becoming his predominantly-white high school's class president and attending Harvard University in the early 1890s. He made history as Harvard's first African-American student to become a member of the Phi Beta Kappa honor fraternity before graduating magna cum laude from the school in 1895, later earning a master's degree. Stalled from going into banking due to discrimination, Trotter worked in real estate. In 1899, he married Geraldine L. Pindell. Trotter became a staunch opponent of racial discrimination and found himself in conflict with Booker T. Washington, the era's most popular African-American leader. Washington advocated a more conciliatory approach with the status quo and pushed for African Americans to pursue vocational and agricultural training, which Trotter found to be a problematic stance considering Washington's luminary status among white political leaders. In 1901, Trotter co-founded the Boston Literary and Historical Association. With colleague George Forbes, he established The Guardian newspaper to disseminate "propaganda against discrimination." The publication pushed for African-American equality and critiqued Washington's views. In the summer of 1903, Washington visited the AME Zion Church in Boston to give a speech. During the meeting Trotter questioned Washington, which led to a shouting match and ensuing ruckus dubbed "The Boston Riot" by the press. Trotter was arrested, fined and sentenced to a month's imprisonment, during which time he read W.E.B. Du Bois' book The Souls of Black Folk. Upon release, Trotter co-established the National Negro Suffrage League and in 1905 worked with Du Bois to help organize The Niagara Movement, a group of African-American leaders who gathered in Canada and set forth a manifesto calling for full equal rights for black citizens, with the words, "We claim for ourselves every single right that belongs to a freeborn American, political, civil and social." Though Trotter later attended the 1909 conference that would lead to the creation of the NAACP, he wouldn't align himself with the civil rights organization due to his insistence on there being an all-black group and thus focused on developing the National Equal Rights League. Trotter also voiced his opinion in the realm of presidential politics. He had initially supported Woodrow Wilson during his campaign, but protested the administration's policies after seeing that Wilson supported job segregation, with Trotter making his views known at two separate White House meetings. Trotter also led campaigns against the 1915 film Birth of a Nation and its racist messages. Trotter experienced personal loss in 1918, when his wife passed from the era's flu epidemic. After Wilson refused to appoint an African-American delegate to the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, Trotter crossed the Atlantic by stowing away on a ship as a cook. He wasn't allowed to attend the conference but was able to publish articles for French media. In the 1920s, Trotter continued his calls and protests for the end of segregation on a governmental and local level and continued to helm The Guardian. Trotter was found on his birthday, April 7, 1934, on the street outside of his home, believed to have fallen or due to depression from his wife's death committed suicide.. Trotter's work is seen as being an important precedent to the direct-action methods used in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and '60s. Information on Trotter's life can be found in the Stephen B. Fox biography The Guardian of Boston. His legacy is also remembered via Harvard's William Monroe Trotter Scholars Program and the William Monroe Trotter Institute at the University of Massachusetts. Trotter Harvard University Archives; William Monroe Trotter Biography.com, Author Biography.com Editors