Winner • Mark Lynton History Prize New York Times • Times Critics Top Books of 2019 The award-winning biography that restores William Monroe Trotter to his essential place next to Douglass, Du Bois, and Malcom X in the pantheon of American civil rights heroes. 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.