New Orleans in the summer of 1900 was a city that believed it understood itself. It understood its heat, the suffocating weight of July pressing down on the French quarters’ iron balconies and the shotgun houses of the TM, turning the air thick as wet cloth. It understood its music, the brass bands that moved through the streets like rivers finding their own level.
the sounds of a city that had always known how to carry joy and grief simultaneously. It understood its hierarchies, the careful, brutal ordering of who mattered and who did not, who could walk where and sit where, and speak to whom, with what degree of difference, an ordering so deeply embedded in the city’s daily life, that most people had stopped noticing it the way they stopped noticing the smell of the river.
What the city did not understand was Robert Charles. He was 34 years old, born in 1865 in Copia County, Mississippi. In the same year that the war ended and the amendments began and the brief bright window of reconstruction opened before being systematically shut by the men who had lost the war and intended to win the peace.
He had come to New Orleans in his 20s, one of thousands of black men who left the Mississippi interior for the city’s slightly larger possibilities. its slightly more complex social landscape. Its reputation partially deserved, partially myth, as a place where the rules were different, where the categories were looser, where a man of intelligence and determination might find room to breathe.
He had not found as much room as he hoped. He worked as a laborer moving between jobs with the quiet persistence of a man who has decided to keep moving regardless of what the landscape offers. He read voraciously newspapers, political tracks, the writings of Henry McNeel Turner, the black nationalist bishop who argued that Africanameans should return to Africa, that the promises of American democracy were promises made in bad faith and kept in worse.
Robert Charles had become in the years before 1900 a quiet distributor of Turner’s publication, a man who stood on street corners and in barbershops and handed literature to other black men who were trying to understand the world they lived in. The white people of New Orleans, who would later be asked to describe him, would use words like suspicious and dangerous and desperate.
The black people of New Orleans who knew him would use different words, principled, serious, a man who paid attention. He was not large. He was not physically imposing in the way that the mythology of blackmail threat required him to be. He was a medium-sized man with a quiet manner and a habit of watching everything around him with the particular attention of someone who has decided that the world requires careful reading.
He had for several years been legally armed, a Winchester rifle that he kept clean and ready in the room he rented on Driad Street, not because he anticipated using it, but because he had decided at some point that he never precisely documented that he was finished with the alternative. The alternative was the studied, constant, corrosive performance of harmlessness that the city required of its blackmail residents.
The downcast eyes, the soft voice, the body language of perpetual apology, the daily renegotiation of the right to exist in public space without triggering the anxiety of white people who had been taught that black presence was inherently suspicious. Robert Charles had performed this for years. He had watched other men perform it for their entire lives, growing smaller and smaller inside the performance until the performance was all that was left.
He had decided he was finished with it. On the evening of July the 23rd, 1900, he was sitting on the front steps of a house on Dryade Street with his friend Leonard Pierce, 20 years old, waiting for a woman who lived nearby. It was a warm evening. They were talking. They were doing nothing. Three white police officers turned the corner.
Sergeant Jules Okcoan had been on the New Orleans police force for 11 years. And in those 11 years he had developed a reliable professional instinct that he would have described, if pressed, as experience. What it actually was, though he would not have used this language, was a set of assumptions so thoroughly embedded in his perception of the city that they functioned as facts.
Assumptions about who belonged where, about what black men doing nothing in the evening signified, about the correct response to the anxiety produced by black presence in spaces where white comfort was the default standard. He saw two black men sitting on steps in a predominantly white neighborhood, and he felt the familiar professional alertness, the sense that something required addressing.
Officer August Mora and Officer Joseph Canrell flanked him as he approached. The evening was quiet. Cicas, the distant sound of a street car, the smell of the river. What are you doing here? Aquin demanded, stopping in front of Robert Charles and Leonard Pierce. What are you waiting for? Robert Charles looked up at him.
Not with deference, not with the practiced eyes down submission that the interaction required, and that all coin’s entire professional experience had trained him to expect. He looked up with the level direct gaze of a man responding to another man. He said quietly that he was waiting for someone who lived nearby, that he had done nothing wrong, that he was going to stay where he was.
The specific words of what followed have been debated and reconstructed from multiple accounts that do not entirely agree with each other. What is not disputed is the outcome. Awan reached for Robert Charles intending to detain him and Robert Charles who had made a decision at some point in the years before this evening about the limits of what he would permit resisted.
The scuffle was brief and violent. Mora struck Charles with his baton. Charles drew his revolver. Mora drew his and fired. The bullet grazed Charles’s thigh. Charles fired back. His bullet struck Mora in the thigh in return. In the chaos of the exchange, Charles broke away from the officers and ran. Leonard Pierce was taken into custody, confused and frightened, having done nothing at all.
Robert Charles ran through the streets of New Orleans with a bullet wound in his leg and the knowledge that what had just happened was not an incident that would resolve itself through the normal channels. He knew what the normal channels were. He had read the newspapers. He had distributed literature about what happened to black men who struck back at police officers in the American South in 1900.
He had no illusions about the machinery that was now in motion. He ran to his room on Fourth Street, where his Winchester rifle was waiting, where he had ammunition, where he had the tools for what he had already understood was coming. He did not run from the city. He did not attempt to disappear. He went to his room and he prepared with the methodical calm of a man who has thought about this moment without knowing exactly when it would arrive for what the city was about to bring to him.
The police arrived at his room before dawn. Charles shot Sergeant Jules Aquaan through the door, wounding him severely. He shot another officer. Then he was gone again, moving through the pre-dawn city with his rifle in his wound and the knowledge that the machinery was accelerating. Behind him, the city was waking up to its own version of the story.
The New Orleans Times Democrat hit the streets with its Morning Edition. And the Morning Edition had a story. Desperate Negro shoots officers, armed and dangerous. Race agitator turns fugitive. The language was precise in its imprecision. every word chosen to activate the specific fears that the city’s white readership carried in the part of themselves where the logic of white supremacy lived.
The place that translated black assertiveness into black savagery, black self-defense into black criminality, a man refusing to be beaten into a threat to civilization itself. The newspapers did not report that Charles had been sitting quietly on steps before being approached and struck. They reported that officers had investigated a suspicious individual and been attacked without provocation.
They did not report that Charles had been grazed by a police bullet before he fired his own weapon. They reported that a dangerous criminal had opened fire on officers of the law. They did not ask what a man in Robert Charles’s position was supposed to do when struck by a baton and then shot. That question did not appear in their coverage because it was not a question that their readership was supposed to ask.
By noon on July 24th, the story had spread through the city’s white neighborhoods with the speed and the heat of a summer fire. Armed mobs began forming in the streets, not organized, not unified, but moving with the particular momentum of people who have been given permission through the mechanism of the newspaper and the implicit endorsement of official silence to act on the fear that the story had activated.
They were looking for Robert Charles, but they were willing to find any black man in his place. What followed for the next 3 days was one of the most sustained and undifferentiated acts of white mob violence in a city that had considerable experience with such acts. Black men were pulled from street cars and beaten. A black school was attacked.
A black church was set on fire. Men who had nothing to do with Robert Charles, who had never met Robert Charles, who had been walking to work or sitting on their porches or minding the business of their ordinary lives, were beaten and in some cases killed because the newspapers had printed a story and the mobs had decided that the story gave them license.
The police largely watched. The mayor issued statements calling for calm that had no discernable effect on the mobs doing the beating. The machinery of the city, the newspapers, the police, the political apparatus had chosen its side, as it always chose its side. And its side was not the side of the black people being attacked in the streets.
Robert Charles read the newspapers when he could. He was hiding in a series of locations throughout the city, moving with a discipline and a knowledge of New Orleans’s geography that suggested years of having paid close attention to a city that had not always paid attention back. His wound was healing or not healing. The accounts differ. He was in pain.
He was alone. He was reading the story they were telling about him and comparing it to the story he knew. He had one more card to play and he was waiting for the right moment to play it. He came to rest finally in an apartment building on Saratoga Street in the Fobour Lafayette neighborhood, a building occupied by a black family who knew him or knew of him, who understood that sheltering him was an act of extraordinary risk, and who sheltered him anyway with the particular courage of people who have decided that there
are things that matter more than personal safety. He was there for 3 days. In those three days, the city outside continued its violence. The mobs moved through black neighborhoods with a confidence born of impunity. They knew, because experience had always confirmed it, that the consequences for attacking black people in New Orleans in 1900 were negligible.
They attacked and burned and beat, and the machinery of official response continued to focus not on the mobs, but on the man the mobs were using as their justification. Robert Charles in the apartment on Saratoga Street was not idle. He had his Winchester. He had ammunition. He had in the specific and terrible way of a man who understands that he has moved beyond the point of ordinary options a clarity of purpose that came from having nothing left to lose except the terms of the ending.
He had written in the days before July 23rd letters to associates to people who shared his political commitments to the circulation networks that distributed the literature. He had been spreading through the city’s barberh shops and street corners. Some of these letters were recovered after his death and are part of the historical record.
They are not the letters of a desperate man. They are the letters of a man who had thought carefully about the world he lived in and had arrived at conclusions that he was no longer willing to keep entirely to himself. On the morning of July 27th, an anonymous tip reached the police. The tip identified Saratoga Street. The officers who arrived did not knock.
They had been told that Robert Charles was inside. And they had been told that he was armed. And they came with the confidence of men who believed that the disproportion of force, multiple armed officers, against one wounded fugitive, guaranteed the outcome. Sergeant Gabriel Portius led the group up the stairs toward the room where Charles had taken cover.
Portius reached the door. He pushed it open. Robert Charles from his position inside the room fired once with his Winchester. Sergeant Portius fell dead in the doorway. Corporal John Lai behind him, was hit by the second shot and died within the hour. The sound of two more police officers dying brought the entire neighborhood to a halt.
The crowd that gathered outside the building on Saratoga Street within the hour of the shootings was estimated by various accounts at somewhere between 1,000 and several thousand people. They came with rifles and shotguns and revolvers. They came with the fury of people who had been told for 4 days that a black man had disrupted the natural order of things and that restoring that order was a matter of civic necessity.
They came believing that they were on the right side of history, that their numbers made them righteous, that the disproportion between one man and a thousand was itself a kind of justice. Robert Charles inside the building held them off for hours. This is the part of the story that the newspapers of 1900 struggled most to tell because it was the part that most thoroughly disrupted the narrative they had constructed.
The narrative required a desperate criminal cowering in a corner, a dangerous animal cornered at last, a problem about to be resolved by the superior force of civilization reasserting itself. What they had instead was a man shooting with extraordinary precision from a fortified position, picking his targets carefully, declining to panic, declining to run, declining to perform the terror that the situation was supposed to produce in him. He shot 27 men.
Four of them died. The rest were wounded with a precision that suggested not desperation but calculation. A managing his ammunition, choosing his moments, making every shot count in the way of someone who had thought about the mathematics of an impossible situation and decided to make the mathematics as favorable as possible.
The crowd outside fired back. Hundreds of rounds went into the building. The walls absorbed them. Charles moved between positions inside the room, presenting a moving target using the architecture of the building the way a military tactician uses terrain. Not because he had military training, but because he had the kind of spatial intelligence that comes from paying very close attention to the world around you for your entire life.
Hours passed. The crowd outside grew more and more frantic. Men who had arrived certain that this would be quick found themselves pinned behind fences and wagons and the corners of neighboring buildings unable to advance without stepping into the sighteline of a rifle that had already demonstrated its accuracy at considerable cost to those who had underestimated it.
The mayor was called. The governor was reached by telephone. Official voices urged calm, urged order, urged the crowd to stand back and let the authorities handle the situation. Authorities who were themselves unable to handle the situation, who had tried to handle it by sending officers up the stairs and had lost two of them in the first 10 seconds.
The newspapers, scrambling to report what was happening, settled on language that acknowledged the facts while refusing their implications. Robert Charles was putting up resistance. Robert Charles was causing trouble. Robert Charles was preventing the restoration of order. They could not quite bring themselves to write what was actually happening, which was that one man alone, wounded, surrounded by thousands, was holding his ground with a precision and a courage that was by any honest measure remarkable.
Inside the building on Saratoga Street in the hours of the siege, Robert Charles was doing something that the world outside would spend the next century struggling to categorize. He was not suicidal. Suicide is the surrender of the will to live. And Robert Charles had not surrendered anything.
He was doing the opposite. He was exercising his will to live with the maximum possible intensity, which meant that he was fighting with everything he had for as long as he had it. Because the alternative was not life, but only a different form of death. the death of being dragged from the building by a mob that had already demonstrated in four days of violence against his neighbors what it intended to do with black bodies it got its hands on.
He had understood from the moment the first officers came to his door before dawn on July 24th that the machinery of the city had decided his fate. The question was not whether he would die. That had been decided by the logic of a system that could not permit the president of a black man who had struck back at officers and escaped.
The question was how and on whose terms and what the terms would cost the people who came to collect them. He had chosen to make the terms as costly as possible. This is not the story that the newspapers told because the newspapers could not tell it without acknowledging what it meant. It meant that a black man in New Orleans in 1900 had decided that his life had value, not the conditional provisional contingent value that the system assigned to it.
the value that could be revoked at any moment by any officer with a baton and a badge, but an absolute unconditional value that he was willing to defend with a Winchester rifle against whatever force the city chose to send against him. This was the idea that the system most feared. Not the rifle. Rifles could be taken, not the man. Men could be killed.
The idea, the idea that a black man might look at the full weight of white supremacy with its mobs and its police and its newspapers and its official apparatus of law and custom and violence and decide that he was worth fighting for. That his life, his body, his right to sit on a step on a warm evening without being struck by a baton.
that these things were worth the cost of the fight. The crowd outside had a thousand guns. Robert Charles had one. The crowd outside had the law, the police, the mayor, the newspapers, and a century of established practice on its side. Robert Charles had a Winchester and the conviction that he was right. He held them for hours with this, which is either the most American story imaginable or the least American story imaginable, depending on who is doing the imagining.
At some point in the afternoon, someone in the crowd decided that the way to end the siege was to burn the building. It was a logical conclusion in the specific logic of people whose strategy had failed and who needed a new one. The conventional approaches sending officers up the stairs, firing through the walls, waiting for the ammunition to run out, had produced dead officers, and a crowd that was growing angrier and more frightened in equal measure.
Fire would be different. Fire would remove the cover that was making the precision shooting possible. Fire would force the man inside to choose between burning and moving. And moving into the open street meant moving into the sightelines of a thousand guns. They said it. The building caught. Smoke began to fill the room where Robert Charles had been holding his position.
He came through the door firing. The accounts of what happened in the next seconds are numerous and inconsistent, as accounts of violent events always are, but they converge on the essential facts. Robert Charles emerged from the burning building, still shooting, still fighting, still presenting a target that the crowd had to deal with rather than simply collect.
He was shot by a man named Andrew Gedri, a special officer deputized in the chaos of the day, and then the crowd, which had been held at bay for hours by one man and a rifle, surged forward. What they did to his body afterward is documented in the newspapers of the time, and it does not require description here. It is sufficient to say that the crowd’s treatment of Robert Charles’s body revealed something about the nature of their fear that their behavior during the siege had already suggested.
They needed him to be diminished, needed the ending of him to be a spectacle that restored the order his existence had disrupted. They needed to make what he had done unspeakable, unthinkable, a cautionary tale rather than an example. They failed, not immediately. In the short term, the newspapers succeeded in burying the story beneath their own version of it.
The crazed negro, the dangerous desperado, the threat to order finally eliminated. In the short term, the city’s white residents filed back to their lives with the satisfaction of a problem resolved, a narrative completed, a hierarchy restored. But Robert Charles had shot 27 people. He had killed four officers and held a thousand men at bay for hours.
and in the black neighborhoods of New Orleans, in the barber shops and the churches and the shotgun houses where his literature had circulated. The story that was told was not the newspaper story. Ida B. Wells was in New Orleans within weeks. She had spent a decade documenting lynching and racial violence, building the evidentiary record that the system worked so hard to prevent from existing.
She gathered accounts. She interviewed witnesses. She wrote the pamphlet that would be titled Mob Rule in New Orleans. The document that preserved the shape of what had actually happened, that refused the newspaper version, that gave Robert Charles the name that the newspapers had not, the hero of New Orleans.
The legend went into the ground with him and came back up differently. Eda B. Wells had been fighting this fight for 10 years when she arrived in New Orleans to document what had happened to Robert Charles and what had happened to the city’s black population in the 4 days of mob violence that had used his name as a justification.
She had been 29 years old in 1892 when three friends of hers were lynched in Memphis and she had responded to their deaths by doing what she had been trained to do as a journalist. She investigated. She gathered facts. She challenged the narratives that the white press constructed to justify the lynchings.
the narratives of black criminality and white necessity, the stories that transformed victims into aggressors and murders into acts of public hygiene. She published her findings in her newspaper, The Free Speech, and the white citizens of Memphis responded by burning her printing press down and threatening to lynch her if she returned to the city.
She did not return to Memphis. She continued her work from New York and then from Chicago, building a career and a body of documented evidence that constituted the most thorough contemporary accounting of racial violence in American history. She knew the machinery she was fighting. The machinery that produced the lies that ensured the impunity that turned the story of a man sitting on steps into the story of a dangerous criminal who had to be eliminated.
She had been taking that machinery apart piece by piece for a decade. What she found in New Orleans confirmed what she already knew and added specifics that mattered. She found that Robert Charles had been doing nothing wrong when the officers approached him. She found that he had been struck and shot before he returned fire.
She found that the mob violence that followed, the beatings, the burnings, the attacks on innocent black people throughout the city had been enabled by the newspapers that framed Charles as a dangerous criminal, and by the officials who either participated in or allowed the violence. She found names and dates and incidents and witnesses, the specific texture of documented truth that is harder to dismiss than general assertion.
She wrote it down. She published it. She put her name on it. The pamphlet circulated through black communities throughout the country. It circulated through the networks that distributed the kind of information that the mainstream press declined to print. the church networks, the fraternal organization networks, the barbershop networks, the networks of black women’s clubs that were building city by city the institutional infrastructure of a community that had been excluded from the mainstream institutions.
Robert Charles could not read what she wrote about him, but the people who read it could. And the story they found there was not the story the Times Democrat had printed. The story they found was of a man who had decided at the cost of everything, that he was worth defending. That decision was the legacy.
That decision was what the newspapers couldn’t burn and the mob couldn’t diminish and the official version couldn’t finally suppress. New Orleans tried to move on from Robert Charles the way cities try to move on from things that disturb them by reclassifying the disturbance as an anomaly.
By constructing an official story that made the anomaly comprehensible and therefore dismissible. By ensuring that the version of events most convenient to the existing order was the version that made it into the permanent record. The permanent record for most of the 20th century recorded a crazed negro criminal and the mob that responded to him.
The permanent record did not record a man sitting on steps who was struck and shot before he fired his weapon. The permanent record did not record the mob violence against innocent black people throughout the city. The permanent record did not record what Ida B. Wells had found and written and distributed.
This is what suppression looks like when it works. not the elimination of the truth, but its demotion. The truth remained available in Wells’s pamphlet, in the black press accounts of 1900, in the oral traditions of New Orleans’s black community, where the story of Robert Charles was told and retold for generations. It was available, but it was not official, not mainstream, not the version taught in schools or commemorated in the city’s public spaces.
The machinery of official memory, like the machinery of official violence, works systematically. It does not need to eliminate every copy of the truth. It needs only to ensure that the truth occupies a different tier of authority than the official version. That it is accessible to those who seek it out but invisible to those who don’t.
That it can be dismissed as community mythology or partisan account rather than encountered as history. For most of the century that followed July 1900, this is where Robert Charles lived. In the tier of things that black New Orleans knew and white New Orleans did not know, it didn’t know. He was there in Jelly Roll.
Mortens claimed to have composed a song commemorating his courage. A song that was apparently suppressed or lost. So dangerous was even the musical memory of a black man who had fought back. He was there in the barbershop stories, the church fellowship accounts, the family histories of people whose grandfathers and greatgrandfathers had lived through the four days of mob violence and remembered what had started it.
The modern scholarship that recovered Robert Charles and returned him to his full historical dimensions began in the 1970s with William Ivy Hair’s Carnival of Fury and has continued through subsequent decades as historians trained in the practices of recovery of finding what the official record suppressed of reading against the grain of the mainstream sources.
of taking seriously the oral traditions and alternative archives that have preserved what the newspapers chose not to print, have built the more complete picture. It is a picture of a man who was by any honest measure remarkable, who read widely and thought carefully and came to conclusions about the world that the world found threatening.
who sat on steps on a warm evening and was struck and shot for the crime of existing in the wrong space and responded to this with a principle rather than a performance. Who held a thousand men at bay for hours with one rifle and the conviction that he was right. The city tried to forget him. It did not entirely succeed.
A century and a quarter after the night on Dryad Street, the question of Robert Charles has not been resolved so much as it has been reopened with more honest tools, more willing eyes, and a better understanding of what it costs to tell a story that the official record spent decades trying to bury.
He has a historical marker now on the street where the siege took place. The marker was installed not by the city’s official commemorative machinery, which took a long time to get there, but by the pressure of people who understood that the absence of a marker was itself a statement, a continuation of the suppression, the official memory’s ongoing refusal to acknowledge what had happened. The marker says what happened.
It uses the word hero, which is the word that Ida B. Wells used in 1900 and which the newspapers of 1900 could not bring themselves to use. The song that Jelly Roll Morton claimed to have written was never found. whether it existed and was destroyed, whether it was composed and not recorded, whether Morton’s claim was memory or legend.
These questions cannot be answered from the surviving evidence. What can be said is that the impulse to make music about Robert Charles, to carry the story in the form that carries furthest and lasts longest, was real and immediate and present in the black community of New Orleans within days of his death.
The story was already doing what important stories do, finding the containers that can hold it across time. The containers that have held it are various. Wells’s pamphlet, hair’s scholarship, the histories and articles and dissertations that followed. The oral traditions that kept the name alive in the community where the events had happened.
And now increasingly, the broader recovery of the history of black resistance in America. the project of telling the full story of who fought back and how and at what cost and what it meant. Robert Charles fought back. This is in its simplest form what the story contains. A man decided that the right to sit on steps on a warm evening, the right to meet the eyes of a police officer without deference, the right to say I have done nothing wrong and mean it without immediately retreating into the practiced smallalness that the system required. These rights were worth
fighting for, worth the cost of the fight which was everything. He did not win in the sense that the system survived and adapted and continued its operations. He did not win in the sense that the mob was stopped or the violence ended or the newspapers corrected their reporting. He did not win in the sense that New Orleans was made more just by what he did.
But he refused to lose in the way the system needed him to lose. He refused the performance. He refused the smallalness. He refused to confirm through his submission the story the newspapers were telling about who he was and what he was worth. He refused in the end to let them have the ending they had planned for.
the quick, quiet, efficient resolution that would have produced no historical record, no marker, no pamphlet, no song, no century of people carrying his name. He made his ending cost something. He made it require acknowledgment. He made the city and the century that followed deal with the fact that he had happened. Ida B.
Wells called him the hero of New Orleans. The city took a long time to agree, but the story, which he made impossible to entirely suppress by the simple act of making it too dramatic and too costly to minimize, outlasted the suppression. It is still being told. You are part of the telling now.
