The Ballad of Robert Charles: Searching for the New Orleans Riot of 1900

By K. Stephen Prince

For a brief moment in the summer of 1900, Robert Charles was arguably the most infamous black man in the United States. After an altercation with police on a New Orleans street, Charles killed two police officers and fled. During a manhunt that extended for days, violent white mobs roamed the city, assaulting African Americans and killing at least half a dozen. When authorities located Charles, he held off a crowd of thousands for hours before being shot to death. The notorious episode was reported nationwide; years later, fabled jazz pianist Jelly Roll Morton recalled memorializing Charles in song. Yet today, Charles is almost entirely invisible in the traditional historical record. So who was Robert Charles, really? An outlaw? A black freedom fighter? And how can we reconstruct his story?

In this fascinating work, K. Stephen Prince sheds fresh light on both the history of the Robert Charles riots and the practice of history-writing itself. He reveals evidence of intentional erasures, both in the ways the riot and its aftermath were chronicled and in the ways stories were silenced or purposefully obscured. But Prince also excavates long-hidden facts from the narratives passed down by white and black New Orleanians over more than a century. In so doing, he probes the possibilities and limitations of the historical imagination.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Feb 10, 2021
• ISBN: 9781469661834

K. Stephen Prince

K. Stephen Prince is assistant professor of history at the University of South Florida.

Book preview

THE BALLAD OF ROBERT CHARLES

THE BALLAD OF ROBERT CHARLES

Searching for the New Orleans Riot of 1900

K. STEPHEN PRINCE

THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS

Chapel Hill

This book was published with the assistance of the Fred W. Morrison Fund of the University of North Carolina Press.

© 2021 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

Designed by Jamison Cockerham

Set in Arno, Scala Sans, Cutright, Irby, and Isherwood by Tseng Information Systems, Inc.

Cover illustrations: (top) Sketch of Robert Charles from the Daily Picayune (New Orleans), July 25, 1900, 8; (bottom) Citizen policemen in New Orleans; photograph courtesy of the Collections of the Louisiana State Museum, New Orleans

Manufactured in the United States of America

The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Names: Prince, K. Stephen, author.

Title: The ballad of Robert Charles : searching for the New Orleans riot of 1900 / K. Stephen Prince.

Description: Chapel Hill : The University of North Carolina Press, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020038263 | ISBN 9781469661810 (cloth) | ISBN 9781469661827 (paperback) | ISBN 9781469661834 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Charles, Robert, 1865?–1900. | Race riots—Louisiana—New Orleans—History—19th century. | New Orleans (La.)—Race relations. | New Orleans (La.)—Historiography.

Classification: LCC F379.N553 C426 2021 | DDC 976.3/3506092 [B]—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020038263

A version of chapter 5 originally appeared as K. Stephen Prince, Remembering Robert Charles: Violence and Memory in Jim Crow New Orleans, Journal of Southern History 83, no. 2 (May 2017): 297–328.

For Julia

CONTENTS

Introduction: A Song Forgotten

Prologue: A Narrative History of the 1900 New Orleans Riot

1 SETTING

2 SILENCE

3 RIOT

4 RECKONING

5 REMEMBRANCE

Epilogue: Ghosts of Robert Charles

Acknowledgments

Appendix

Notes

Bibliography

Index

FIGURES, MAPS, AND TABLES

FIGURES

Cover of Progressive New Orleans (1895)

Relic Hunters, Daily Picayune, July 29, 1900

Artist renderings of Robert Charles

Electioneering at the South, Harper’s Weekly, July 25, 1868

Citizen police at Camp and Common Streets

African Americans watch as the citizen police pass

Scene of the Man Hunt, New Orleans Times-Democrat, July 28, 1900

The Scene of the Capture, Daily Picayune, July 28, 1900

Subscriptions for the police widows and orphans

Souvenir citizen police badge

Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Mob Rule in New Orleans (1900)

Najee Dorsey, Google Robert Charles (2011)

MAPS

New Orleans: Downtown, uptown, and back of town

Swampland Not Improved, 1887 and 1895

Robert Charles’s residences and sites of violence

Racial demographics in a back-of-town neighborhood

Riot sites and jazz sites

Home addresses of select riot arrestees

Addresses of select riot arrestees and crime scenes

Racial demographics in Hanna Mabry’s neighborhood

TABLES

1. Basic demographic information about riot arrestees

A.1. White people killed or injured during mob events, July 23–27, 1900

A.2. Black people killed or injured during mob events, July 23–27, 1900

THE BALLAD OF ROBERT CHARLES

INTRODUCTION

A Song Forgotten

This book tells the story of an event too explosive to remember, a song too dangerous to sing. In 1938, folklorist Alan Lomax recorded a series of interviews with pioneering jazz pianist and New Orleans native Jelly Roll Morton. During their conversations, Morton expounded, exaggerated, and waxed philosophical, living up to his reputation as a legendary teller of tales. However, his treatment of one topic—the 1900 New Orleans riot—was notable less for what Morton said than for what he left unsaid. Morton was a young child in July 1900, when a black man named Robert Charles killed several white police officers, sparking a week of racial violence that claimed the lives of more than a dozen black and white New Orleanians. Thirty-eight years later, as Morton sat with Lomax, playing a droning tune on the piano, he shared his version of the Robert Charles story. Partway through his tale, he paused and said something surprising: Like many other bad men, Morton said, Robert Charles had a song originated on him. This song was squashed very easily by the [police] department, and not only by the department but by anyone else who heard it, due to the fact that it was a trouble breeder. So that song never did get very far. He continued: I once knew the Robert Charles song, but I found it was best for me to forget it and that I did in order to go along with the world on the peaceful side.¹ Perhaps Jelly Roll Morton had truly forgotten The Ballad of Robert Charles by the time of the interview with Lomax. Perhaps he simply chose not to share it. Perhaps it had never existed at all. Regardless, Jelly Roll Morton’s tantalizing account—of the song that he would not remember but could not forget—invites us to dig deeper, following the tangled threads of race, power, violence, and memory woven through the story of Robert Charles and the 1900 New Orleans riot.

At around 11 P.M. on Monday, July 23, 1900, Robert Charles and a friend named Leonard Pierce sat on a stoop at 2815 Dryades Street, in an uptown area of New Orleans today known as Central City. Three members of the New Orleans Police Department (NOPD) approached. When Robert Charles tried to stand up, patrolman August Mora moved to strike him with his baton. After a brief struggle, Mora and Charles drew their weapons and exchanged fire. Both men were wounded, and Charles fled into the night. Several hours later, police tracked Charles to his rented room nearby. As the officers approached his door, Charles opened fire with a Winchester rifle, killing Capt. John T. Day and patrolman Peter J. Lamb. Before the police could regroup, Charles escaped once more.

With Charles in hiding, white residents of New Orleans turned on innocent African Americans. Tensions simmered on July 24, but large-scale violence did not break out. However, the next night, Wednesday, July 25, a white mob gathered and began to target black residents. After they were denied entry to the Parish Prison, where Leonard Pierce was being held, the mob spent the rest of the night roaming the city streets in search of victims. Three African Americans were killed or mortally wounded on the first night of rioting. Many more were injured. Through it all, the NOPD did little to protect the city’s black population. On the morning of Thursday, July 26, Mayor Paul Capdevielle deputized an emergency civilian police force in the hopes of suppressing the rioters. Some semblance of order returned to the city’s streets by early evening. However, several more acts of violence—including the shooting of a black woman in her own home—occurred overnight.

On Friday, July 27, the New Orleans Police Department finally located Robert Charles. On the basis of an anonymous tip, Sgt. Gabriel Porteous and Cpl. John F. Lally went to investigate the residence of Silas and Martha Jackson, at 1208 Saratoga Street. When they entered a small outbuilding in the backyard, Charles burst from his hiding place. He shot the two officers, killing Porteous and mortally wounding Lally. He then retreated to the second floor of the building. As word of the shootings spread, a heavily armed crowd gathered near the corner of Saratoga and Clio Streets. Over the next several hours, hundreds of weapons fired thousands of rounds at the small structure where Charles made his last stand. During the shootout, Robert Charles killed three members of the crowd and wounded several more. Desperate city authorities finally approved a plan to set fire to Charles’s hideout. He was shot and killed as he emerged from the burning building. The enraged crowd set upon the corpse, beating it and shooting it more than thirty times.

During the final shootout, members of the Saratoga Street crowd murdered an unidentified black man who was in police custody. Around the same time, a white mob killed an African American man near the French Market. Later that night, in one final act of racial vengeance, a white crowd set fire to the Thomy Lafon School, the city’s finest black educational institution.

During the last week of his life, Robert Charles killed seven white people, including four members of the New Orleans Police Department. According to the official tallies published in the city’s newspapers, white mobs murdered six African Americans—none of whom had anything to do with Charles—and wounded many more. It is entirely possible that there were additional black fatalities, but incomplete police and hospital records make it impossible to know for certain.²

How can we begin to understand this story? How might we come to terms with the brutal, horrific, and appalling—yet strangely captivating—bloodshed that gripped New Orleans in July 1900? Who was Robert Charles, the everyman turned armed rebel at the center of this bloody tale? In its attempt to answer these questions, to make sense of an explosive historical event, and to recover a piece of Charles and his world, this book foregrounds three interrelated themes: violence, space, and silence. In the pages that follow, we will explore each of them in turn.

In the aftermath of Reconstruction, white southerners revolutionized their region’s racial order. They engineered a retreat from the racial egalitarianism of the post–Civil War years, stripping away the civil and political rights that African Americans had earned in the wake of emancipation. The system of discrimination and domination they built would come to be known as Jim Crow. Beginning with the segregation of the region’s railways in the 1880s, white southerners systematically drew the color line through the region’s public space.³ In the years after 1890, every former Confederate state stripped African Americans of the right to vote, displaying considerable ingenuity in circumventing the Fifteenth Amendment’s guarantee of universal manhood suffrage.⁴

The Jim Crow system was born in bloodshed and maintained with murder. It was a child of the lynch mob, the racial massacre, and innumerable subtler instances of violence. Apologists for Jim Crow would claim that their region’s racial order was natural, organic, and consensual, but the truth was far darker. Without the ever-present specter of bloodshed—threatened, enacted, witnessed, and remembered—white supremacy was little more than a slogan. Between 1889 and 1918, white mobs lynched nearly 2,400 African Americans in the states of the former Confederacy.⁵ Defying the formal legal system and taking the law into their own hands, white mobs wrote the essential truth of southern white supremacy in blood. In these same turn-of-the-century years, a series of race riots—a polite euphemism for events that were, in reality, racial massacres—swept the South. Measured in terms of lives lost, homes destroyed, and residents displaced, the violence that swept New Orleans in 1900 paled in comparison to the riots that shattered the black communities of Wilmington, North Carolina (1898); Atlanta, Georgia (1906); and Tulsa, Oklahoma (1921).⁶ The immediate causes of these incidents varied, but in each case, the mobs took a devastating toll.

Late nineteenth-century New Orleans saw its share of racially motivated street violence. On September 14, 1874, the White League, a paramilitary organization made up of members of the city’s economic and social elite, took to the streets in an attempt to overthrow Republican Reconstruction in the state. They crushed the city’s integrated police force in a battle at the levee and chased the duly elected governor of Louisiana into hiding at the U.S. Custom House, where he remained until the arrival of federal troops a few days later. The so-called Battle of Liberty Place lived on in white popular memory for decades.⁷ Seventeen years later, a white mob took to the streets of New Orleans again. On March 14, 1891, a crowd stormed the Parish Prison and lynched eleven Italian men being held there. The victims had been implicated in the murder of police chief David Hennessy several months earlier. When a jury returned a partial verdict of not guilty in the Hennessy trial, white residents marched on the prison. The victims in 1891 were Italian, not African American, but the mass lynching served as a reminder of the harsh penalties for racial transgression in turn-of-the-century New Orleans.⁸

As searing and brutal as such incidents were, it is worth remembering that violence was not merely an extralegal phenomenon. The state itself was a willing perpetrator of violence against African Americans. From the police to the courts to the prisons, the southern justice system was, by design and by implementation, a blunt instrument of white supremacy and a tool of state-sanctioned racial violence.⁹ The convict lease system, the chain gang, and the prison farm, which between them provided the labor of thousands of prisoners—the vast majority of them African Americans—to private enterprise and the state itself, are only the best-known forms of this judicial violence.¹⁰ In New Orleans and elsewhere, the police department served as an essential cog in the machinery of white supremacy. Through the targeted use of violence, the police were instrumental in the construction and perpetuation of Jim Crow. Violence and racial terror were official state business.

Beyond the lynch mob and the chain gang, African Americans were exposed to a variety of less visible, but equally deadly, manifestations of racial violence on a daily basis. A partial list might include systemic poverty, unsafe housing, environmental threats, dangerous work environments, subpar nutrition, the denial of education, and the unavailability of medical services.¹¹ This violence—in all its forms—provides the necessary background for Robert Charles’s revolt. When Charles drew his weapon on that hot July night, plunging the city of New Orleans into a week of unprecedented racial turmoil, he was not just reacting to the advance of three NOPD officers. His actions spoke to a lifetime of racial violence, both spectacular and mundane. Though much about Charles remains unknown and unknowable, it is clear that he was well-read, politically engaged, and incensed at the campaign of terror targeting black lives and rights across the South. Charles’s actions may or may not have been premeditated, but we should take care in reducing them to simple murder. We must recognize Charles’s rebellion for what it was: a bold act of political resistance and a revolt against a deeply entrenched system of racialized violence.

In New Orleans and elsewhere, the rise of Jim Crow was inextricably linked to struggles over public space. In popular memory, segregation can seem a relatively straightforward matter. The iconic white and colored signs that divided the southern landscape throughout the Jim Crow era suggest clarity and certainty. They evoke an absolute and totalizing bifurcation of space, a complete system of racial ordering and control. In fact, the process of segregating the South was far messier than such signs would suggest. At the time of the Charles riot and well into the twentieth century, segregation was incomplete, imperfect, and contested. For every clearly marked waiting room or train station, there were a variety of other sites that remained racially ambiguous. And how could it be otherwise? The persistence of such liminal spaces reflects the remarkable hubris of the Jim Crow project, which demanded nothing less than a reimagination and redefinition of public space on a regionwide scale. Race was built, negotiated, and contested in the physical spaces of the South.¹²

The fundamental purpose of Jim Crow segregation was not separation. It was white control and domination. As elsewhere in the South, turn-of-the-century white New Orleanians reimagined their city. They turned the urban environment into the physical manifestation of a white supremacy that was otherwise amorphous and theoretical. White residents claimed the public space of the city—at least the best of it—for themselves. Excepting a few undesirable areas on the margins of settlement, the entire city came to be understood as the property of a unified and dominant whiteness. Thus organized, the urban landscape made race seem natural and inevitable. Whiteness was central and dominant. Blackness was peripheral and subordinate. These racial truths were etched into the very streets, squares, and buildings of the city.

In theory, white New Orleanians had created two distinct urban geographies, separate and unequal. In practice, however, the lived racial geography of the city was far more complicated than this neat dichotomy would suggest. In spite of the ideological trappings of Jim Crow, turn-of-the-century New Orleans remained an integrated, biracial space. There was always a middle stratum between the white city and the black city, shared spaces through which both black and white residents moved regularly.¹³ African Americans made up 27.1 percent of the city’s population in 1900.¹⁴ In the wharves and warehouses at the heart of the city’s economic revitalization, in the vice houses of Storyville, and on the dance floors and stages of the music clubs for which the city was becoming famous, interracial contact—even a limited form of interracial sociability—survived and thrived.¹⁵ As they claimed urban space for themselves, therefore, white New Orleanians had no choice but to recognize that the lines were never absolute.

In the face of this problematic integration, white New Orleanians resorted to a sort of selective blindness. Embracing a deep-rooted and flexible commitment to black invisibility, the city’s white residents did their best to ignore the presence, even the very existence, of their black neighbors.¹⁶ In order to preserve the fiction of a white city, in other words, they actively cultivated ignorance. White New Orleanians allowed large sections of the city to remain terra incognita, empty spaces on the map. They trained themselves not to see the black people and the black spaces in their midst, maintaining a posture of intentional unseeing—at least when it proved useful to do so.¹⁷ There were exceptions, of course, moments when white New Orleanians did choose to see and recognize the diversity of their city. Black invisibility was neither absolute nor literal; it was a matter of white convenience and control. The wholesale erasure of a sizable section of the city and an entire population was a prerogative, and requirement, of turn-of-the-century white supremacy. Selective blindness allowed white residents to navigate the precarious interraciality of urban life, protecting and preserving the façade of white control.

Still, the fiction of a white New Orleans demanded a measure of cooperation from African Americans. Jim Crow required black New Orleanians to perform invisibility, disavowing their own presence in the public space of the city even as they passed through it. When they entered white or shared/biracial spaces in the city, racial mores demanded that African Americans maintain a posture of obsequious transparency. However, black residents regularly refused to play their assigned role. They resisted these geographic and behavioral imperatives, transgressing white space and making their presence felt.¹⁸ From sidewalks to city parks to street parades, black New Orleanians insisted that they belonged in the city and that the city belonged to them.

When African Americans violated the cardinal tenet of Jim Crow in New Orleans—invisibility—the white response could be savage. Even as they cultivated racial blindness, white New Orleanians obsessively policed public space, eagerly punishing any perceived encroachment, incursion, or betrayal of carefully structured (and white-approved) boundaries. From the perspective of white New Orleanians, Robert Charles’s transgression went far beyond his attack on the NOPD. As he drew his weapon and defended his right to occupy public space—in this case, a stoop on Dryades Street—Charles made a claim on the city. For white New Orleanians, this was an act of ownership that demanded harsh reprisal. As they searched for Charles and attacked dozens of innocent black New Orleanians, the white rioters sought to reassert control over their city. The urban space of New Orleans was not merely the setting for the 1900 riot. It was the prize to be claimed.

When I began to work on Robert Charles and the 1900 riot, I set out to write a concise, narrative history of a significant, if understudied, episode of Jim Crow–era violence. I hoped to recount the events of late July 1900 in as clear and unvarnished a way as possible. The story, I thought, was interesting enough. I would do the most for my reader by intruding the least, allowing the characters to speak for themselves and the violence to tell its own story.

The book you hold is not the one I set out to write. When I began my research in New Orleans, I had no reason to expect that sources would present a serious problem. On the surface, there appeared to be an embarrassment of historical evidence relating to the riot. In 1900, New Orleans boasted four daily English-language newspapers, several foreign-language papers, and a weekly African American denominational journal. News of the riot gripped the city for weeks, resulting in an avalanche of news reports, opinion pieces, and investigative accounts. It was a major national and international story, making the front page in New York, Los Angeles, and Boston and generating coverage in newspapers as far afield as Toronto, London, and Edinburgh. The city’s official response to the events of late July 1900—including mayoral papers, court files, and police department records—is preserved in collections housed at the New Orleans Public Library. Other archives in and around the city hold a variety of useful collections dealing with race relations in the turn-of-the-century era. Racial violence gripped a major American city for the better part of a week. Finding sufficient evidence to tell the story, I assumed, would not pose a problem.

And yet, I ran into trouble with sources almost immediately. Try as I might, for instance, I could not locate a run of the Daily Item, one of the city’s four English-language daily newspapers, for 1900. The detailed homicide reports of the New Orleans Police Department would have proven an extraordinarily valuable source of information on the violence. Unfortunately, these reports are not extant for the year 1900, though they are available for both 1899 and 1901. Criminal trial records proved to be another disappointment. Several criminal trials sprang from the rioting, but the available judicial records contain little of significance. Such archival setbacks were exasperating, but they are hardly unique to this project. Indeed, even under the best of circumstances, historical research might be imagined as equal parts boredom and frustration, punctuated by moments of discovery and inspiration.

As I continued my research, however, a nagging whisper of doubt became a steady drone and then, finally, a shout that I could no longer ignore.¹⁹ One perspective—arguably the most important to the story—was entirely absent, so thoroughly silenced as to be completely missing from the historical record. That missing voice, of course, belonged to Robert Charles. Though Charles was literate and politically engaged, his historical silence is almost total. The 1900 riot would seem to be a story without a protagonist. An empty void looms at its center, right where Charles should be standing. His motivations, his worldview, and his plans remain hidden. He was the man endlessly spoken about but never allowed to speak. How are we to tell the story of the 1900 riot, lacking any input from its central figure? How do we write the history of a man who is not there?

In part, the silences surrounding Robert Charles were a function of the specific circumstances of his rebellion and violent death. Charles was killed before he had the opportunity to explain himself. There would be no confession, no manifesto, no declaration of principles. The hopes, motivations, and justifications that animated his rebellion went with him to the grave. During the riot, city authorities turned to Charles’s friends, neighbors, and associates in search of information and clues. Fearing the wrath of the mobs and the vengeance of the Jim Crow justice system, however, these character witnesses were quick to dissociate themselves from Charles and his actions. Though police investigators and reporters managed to uncover a few basic facts about Charles’s life in New Orleans, he remained a phantom.

But the silences go deeper than this. They were not just circumstantial but systemic. Robert Charles’s absence reflects the workings of power and inequality on the historical record. Traditional archives do not preserve all voices equally. Charles was a mobile, working-class African American in the age of Jim Crow. He was, by virtue of his class and race, unlikely to leave a mark on the historical record. This sort of narrative inequality—the difficulties that black southerners faced in telling their stories—should be understood as its own form of violence. Until the last week of his life, white New Orleanians knew little and cared less about Robert Charles, who was merely one faceless black person among many. Indeed, were it not for the explosive violence of late July, Charles would be all but invisible in the historical record.

As I continued my work on this book, I decided that I could not, in good conscience, write the straightforward narrative I had once envisioned. To fail to reflect on the power of silences in this story would make me complicit in that silencing and the violence it represents. The book I have written is, perhaps, more complicated than the one I initially imagined. Hopefully it is also more valuable. As much as a book about a riot, The Ballad of Robert Charles is a book about the nature of historical inquiry. Rather than eliding the story’s evidentiary challenges, I embrace and foreground them. Silencing, forgetting, and erasure necessarily form an integral part of this story. My hope is that the theoretical problems that Robert Charles poses may help us to understand the challenges and limitations of historical practice more generally.

At this point, a few words about New Orleans—and New Orleans exceptionalism—are in order. In the years I have been working on this book, I have fielded variations on a single question so many times that I have come to anticipate it, whether the venue is a public lecture or a one-on-one conversation. Though the phrasing varies, the objection is relatively consistent: But it is New Orleans, so … Usually, the speaker does not feel compelled to finish the thought. It is unnecessary, because the mere mention of New Orleans carries the intended meaning. The implication is that the city is so distinct, so far from the mainstream of U.S. history, that events occurring there are wholly inapplicable to events elsewhere. If the riot had occurred in Atlanta or Los Angeles or Washington, D.C., we would be able to make broader claims about it, to compare, to extrapolate, to generalize. Because it occurred in New Orleans, however, it is—must be—wholly singular.

Of course, the very idea of an exceptional New Orleans is a historical construction.²⁰ If Creole cuisine, voodoo practitioners, traditional jazz, and the liquor-fueled hedonism of Bourbon Street dominate popular imaginings of the city, the credit (or blame) goes to a concerted twentieth-century campaign of marketing and tourism. Local elites spent decades cultivating attitudes and expectations in order to attract visitors and dollars.²¹ City boosting, popular culture, and the tourist circuit have combined to make it difficult to see New Orleans as anything but distinct. Such a perspective, however, comes at great intellectual cost. There is more to New Orleans than gumbo, Sazeracs, and When the Saints Go Marching In. If we focus solely on the city’s exotic and distinctive aspects, we marginalize it and miss the ways in which New Orleans has been central to the American experience. In the process, we blind ourselves to what the history of New Orleans has to teach us about the South and about the nation at large.

With that said, local context does matter. While this book challenges the idea of an exceptional New Orleans, it necessarily explores the ways in which the city’s history and culture shaped the events under consideration. Of particular significance here are the tangled histories of race and race-making in the Crescent City. For most of the antebellum period, the city’s racial demography set it apart from the American mainstream. The presence of a relatively privileged class of free, light-skinned Creoles of color—a product of the comparatively lenient emancipation policies of Louisiana’s French and Spanish colonial eras—created a tripartite racial order that unsettled binary notions of black and white prevailing elsewhere in the United States. The postbellum period, however, saw a transformation in the city’s racial terrain. Creoles of color retained their distinctive identity, most obviously through their use of the French language, but they came to represent a small minority of the city’s black population. Demographically speaking, turn-of-the-century black New Orleans looked more similar to the rest of the South than not.²² And indeed, the Robert Charles riot was a strictly black-and-white affair. The linguistic and cultural boundaries that had long divided the city’s black community held absolutely no significance for the white rioters. Though there is no evidence that Robert Charles had any connections with the city’s Afro-Creoles, white mobs stalked and attacked black residents in traditional Creole areas, brutally targeting victims with little regard for heritage or language. In violence, racial difference was made real.

Yes, this is a book about New Orleans, and the peculiarities of the city necessarily loom large in its pages. But it also tells a broader story. Rather than a creature of a unique and wholly distinctive New Orleans, the 1900 riot is best understood as a reflection of a regional and national project—the reconfiguration of race in the violent crucible of white supremacy. Occurring at a pivotal moment in the transition to Jim Crow, the riot solidified a binary understanding of race in the city. This project was not unique to New Orleans. Indeed, the construction of race through violence was intimately linked to southern and American modernity. On this level, New Orleans proved anything but exceptional. In fact, it was all too