Boston Guardian
| Owner(s) | William Monroe Trotter, George Forbes |
|---|---|
| Publisher | William Monroe Trotter |
| Editor | William Monroe Trotter |
| Ceased publication | ca. 1950 |
| Headquarters | Boston, Massachusetts |
The Boston Guardian was an African-American newspaper, co-founded by William Monroe Trotter and George W. Forbes in 1901 in Boston, Massachusetts, and published until the 1950s.
In April 2016, an unrelated publisher launched its own Boston Guardian, a neighborhood weekly newspaper serving the Back Bay, Beacon Hill, Downtown, Fenway, South End, and North End/Waterfront districts of Boston, despite criticism that it had appropriated a historic journalistic name for purely commercial reasons.
The Guardian was founded in November 1901 and published in the same building that had once housed William Lloyd Garrison's Liberator. In March 1901, Trotter helped organize the Boston Literary and Historical Association, a forum for militant race opinion.
The paper enjoyed broad appeal with readers outside of Massachusetts, featuring news of interest to people of color from across the nation, as well as social notes, church news, sports, and fiction. Within its editorial opinion columns, Trotter often assailed the conservative accommodationist ideology of Booker T. Washington, founder of the Tuskegee Institute.
The Guardian reached the peak of its circulation and prestige about the year 1910, roughly coinciding with the establishment of the National Association of Colored People, of which Trotter was a co-founder along with W. E. B. DuBois, et al. Trotter and Du Bois had previously joined with others in the formation of the Niagara Movement, immediate predecessor to the NAACP.
Within the pages of the Guardian, Trotter criticized the slow progress in Negro social advancement in the face of institutional racism, discriminatory practices, and de jure segregation. When Thomas Dixon's 1905 play The Clansman (based on Dixon's novel of the same name) was performed in Boston, the Guardian mounted a campaign that forced it from the stage. The stage production was adapted in 1915 into the film Birth of A Nation by D. W. Griffith, which also faced a boycott campaign organized by the NAACP in Boston.
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