The Robert Charles Riots: Four Days and a City's Rage

Robert Charles was sitting on a doorstep on Dryades Street on the night of July twenty-third, nineteen hundred, when two New Orleans police officers stopped him. The stop was routine in the sense that stopping Black men on the street was routine in New Orleans at the turn of the century. Charles had been reading the literature of the emigration-to-Africa movement, which advocated for Black Americans to leave the United States rather than endure its terms. He was not doing anything illegal.

The altercation that followed left two officers wounded and Charles fleeing. Over the next four days he moved through the city, hiding, while a manhunt assembled around him. He eventually barricaded himself in a house on Saratoga Street. In the standoff that followed, he killed five police officers and wounded nineteen before being shot and killed on July twenty-seventh.

The city's response was five days of mob violence against Black residents across New Orleans. Ida B. Wells, the journalist and anti-lynching activist who had been documenting racial violence for a decade, traveled to New Orleans and investigated the episode. Her nineteen hundred pamphlet, "Mob Rule in New Orleans," is the primary documentary source for the scale of the mob, which she reported as drawing more than twelve thousand white participants. That figure comes from Wells's reporting, which was based on contemporary accounts, and should be understood as a journalist's estimate from a primary witness, not a census count.

Wells's account of what Charles represented was more complicated than either the police or the press allowed. He had fought back. He had held off an armed siege for days. He had killed officers who came to kill him. For some in the Black community he became a figure of contested memory: not a hero in any simple sense, but evidence of what the daily conditions of Jim Crow could make of one human life, and what that life could make of those conditions in return.