Apocalyptic Rhetoric and the Black Protest Movement: William Monroe Trotter’s Civil Rights Activism in Early Twentieth-Century Boston

Apocalyptic Rhetoric and the Black Protest Movement offers a challenging new formulation of African American religious culture by asserting that African American Christianity produced a militant millennialist movement that invoked the apocalypse, the kingdom of God, and the end of the world to compel Black people to oppose racial injustice in the early twentieth century. In this account of the Black civil rights movement in Boston in the early twentieth century, Aaron Pride argues that the apocalyptic rhetoric and millennial imagery disseminated from the Boston Guardian by William Monroe Trotter cast Booker T. Washington and other opponents of Black protest as false prophets, biblical villains, and harbingers of the end times. By placing Black Christianity at the center of Black civil rights activism in the early twentieth century, this book provides a seminal interpretation of the emancipatory capacity of religion as cultural and intellectual force in social and political movements. This book will be of interest to scholars of cultural history, Black studies, and the history of religion.