About the Author: Kerri Greenidge is Mellon Associate Professor in the Department of Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora at Tufts University, where she also co-directs the African American Trail Project. She is also co-director of Tufts' Slavery, Colonialism, and Their Legacies Project. Greenidge is the author of Black Radical: The Life and Times of William Monroe Trotter (2019). Listed by the New York Times as one of its top picks of 2019, the book is the first biography of Boston editor, William Monroe Trotter, written in nearly fifty years. The book received the Mark Lynton Prize in History, the Massachusetts Book Award, the J. Anthony Lukas Award, the Sperber Award from Fordham University, and the Peter J. Gomes Book Prize from the Massachusetts Historical Society. Black Radical was also short-listed for the Stone Book Award from the Museum of African American History, Boston, the Cundill History Prize, and the Plutarch Award for Best biography. Her most recent book, The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in An American Family (2022) was recently listed as a best book of the year by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the Boston Globe, among other publications. It was the 2023 semi-finalist for the Stone Book Award from the Museum of African American History in Boston, and the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award from Phi Beta Kappa. The Grimkes was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Award, in addition to the J. Anthony Lukas Award. Her writings have appeared in the Massachusetts Historical Review, the Radical History Review, the New Yorker, the Atlantic, and the Guardian.

About the Book: Black Radical reclaims William Monroe Trotter (1872–1934) as a seminal figure whose prophetic yet ultimately tragic—and all too often forgotten—life offers a link from Frederick Douglass to Black Lives Matter. Kerri K. Greenidge renders the drama of turn-of-the-century America, showing how Trotter, a Harvard graduate, a newspaperman and an activist, galvanized black working-class citizens to wield their political power despite the virulent racism of post-Reconstruction America. Situating his story in the broader history of liberal New England to “satisfying” (Casey Cep, The New Yorker) effect, this magnificent biography will endure as the definitive account of Trotter’s life, without which we cannot begin to understand the trajectory of black radicalism in America.

Want to read the book before the program? You can buy a copy here