Abstract
This article argues that during the first two decades of the twentieth century, William Monroe Trotter’s Boston Guardian challenged “post-truth” politics at the heart of America’s exploitative racial project both at home and abroad. Trotter’s reinvigorated Black radical press exposed a fundamental lie at the heart of American racialization: that lynching, segregation, and violent white domination were natural features of United States exceptionalism, and that “the colored people themselves” (both at home and abroad) were responsible for their own subjugation. Through the Guardian’s campaign against racial disinformation espoused in mainstream Black newspapers, Trotter influenced the New Negro radicalism of Cyril V. Briggs, Hubert Harrison, and the African Blood Brotherhood.
