You're listening to the History Extra Podcast brought to you by the team behind BBC History magazine,

Britain's best-selling history magazine. I'm Matt Alton. Today's podcast is the historian Kerry Greenidge, author of Black Radical,

the Life and Times of William Monroe Trotter, one of the books shortlisted

for this year's Kundle Prize, of which History Extra is a media partner.

I caught up with Kerry to find out more about her biography of a pioneering black newspaperman.

I have to confess that I hadn't heard of the subject of your new book before I started reading it.

Is that a common thing? Is he well known in America but not over here?

That's actually an excellent question. I found that he's not very well known except

amongst you know African American historians sometimes. so he's really not well known there was one biography that was written in 1970 and that was the last one that was written and so not a lot has been written about William and

Rotter, not a lot has been written about, I know, for those who are

about in, you know, outside of the United States

not laws that has been written about Boston

and New England and civil rights during this era.

So he really is somebody who I was trying to reconstruct their lives because I thought

his life and his works were missing in the scholarship.

When did you first hear about his story?

So in the, one of the afterwards I say in there is that my grandparents actually were activists in Boston going back to the 1950s and so I grew up hearing stories about black activism in New England and just generally.

And the first time I heard the name, or I recall hearing the name is when I was about seven years old

and my grandfather was watching TV and he said, you know, if Trotter were around, we basically wouldn't have these

racial issues that were happening in the city at the time. And through that, I, my grandmother

wrote the name down for me.

I remember being in second grade and she said, you know, he's somebody who was a race man.

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