Black social justice pioneer William Monroe Trotter continues

to energize a new generation of Harvard students to take up the mantle of his

lifelong struggle for racial justice. His legacy lives on through the work of

the William Monroe Trotter

Collaborative for Social Justice at HKS.

Below, you’ll find an excerpt from a 2022 article “A

justice.” 

Photo from a 2022 celebration of William Trotter’s legacy

A Black civil rights icon from Boston still inspires the fight for social justice.

HKS students involved with the

Trotter Collaborative are on the frontlines of initiatives that echo Trotter’s

many campaigns against racism in his time. Through HKS course MLD-375,

Creating Justice in Realtime, more than 60 students have worked with

projects in city and state governments and non-profit organizations across the

country to study and learn advocacy skills firsthand.

Teaching that course is the

Trotter Collaborative’s founder, Cornell

William Brooks, the Hauser Professor of the Practice of Nonprofit

Organizations and Professor of the Practice of Public Leadership and Social

Justice at the School’s Center for Public Leadership, and former national

president of the NAACP.  

Brooks calls the Trotter

Collaborative a “think and do tank.” “If we think about Trotter being an

advocate and an activist, the pedagogy of the Trotter Collaborative focuses on

advocacy, how to persuade, how to advance issues,’” he said in an interview.

“We have our students, who are working on climate change, who are digging into

the policy minutia, the legal minutia, looking at what it takes to get a bill

through legislation. We have students working with mayors on policing issues

asking what constitutional policing means.”  

One of those students is

Damarcus Bell MPP 2022, who joined the office of newly elected Birmingham,

Alabama, Mayor Randall Woodfin and worked in the city’s Office of Peace and

Policy on a public health model of community safety. “The biggest takeaway from

this work has been strategy,” Bell said. “It’s not enough to know what the idea

is. The real question is how do you communicate that? How do you get

stakeholders engaged, particularly around issues that are sensitive and difficult

and muddy and tricky on a moral plane? That’s definitely an acumen I’ve honed

in these classes.”  

Raymi Echavarria Fernandez MPP

2022 was one of several students who worked with Black Voters Matter in

Atlanta. She found the diverse team of student interns a real strength of the

course. “I think that when you’re in an insular space like a policy school, it

just gets wonky very quickly,” she said. “So, we had someone in the MIT

planning program who added experiences that we didn’t have, and someone who is

a trained attorney from the Law School who understands the lingo in the

legislation that we’re looking at.”

Read the full article on the HKS website >>