September 26, 2016 • 43 mins
In July 1900, an interaction between New Orleans police and two black men set off a chain of horrific events. A man hunt, bloodthirsty mobs and senseless murders were all catalyzed by that meeting in a city already grappling with racial tension.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
A quick note about today's episode. We originally started talking
about covering today's topic, which is the New Orleans race
riot of nine hundred, also known as the Robert Charles
Riots in July, following the police shootings of Filando Castile
and Alton Sterling and the July seventh attack on Dallas
police that killed five officers. Because the nine hundred riots
(00:21):
involved violence against both police and New Orleans black community,
it's an important piece of historical context, but also when
we wanted to wait to cover until a little time
had passed. We recorded today's episode on septem prior to
the police shootings of Tyree King, Terence Crutcher, and Keith
Lamont Scott. Welcome to Steph you missed in history class
(00:44):
from how works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
And I'm Tray Steve Wilson, and today we're talking about
a really complex p of history and it's one that
Tracy and I discussed whether or not we should do
it for a while, and I kind of back burnered
(01:05):
it for a little bit because of recent race racial
strife in our own country, But that also makes it
kind of an important moment to examine and look at Yeah,
it have definite parallels to a number of uh, relatively
recent events. It does. The main person in this story, too,
is is a little bit difficult because his name is
(01:27):
Robert Charles, and he's been characterized all across the spectrum
from a villainous monster to a sort of martyr figure. Uh.
And in nine he committed some very horrible violent acts
in a racially charged uh sort of moment in New
Orleans history, and we don't really know why he did this.
(01:47):
And there is, I should say, right up front, a
lot of violence in this story, committed by a lot
of different people. Um. And in reading the source that
I primarily used for the subject, which is a book
called Carnival of Fury, It was written by William Ivy Hare,
it really struck me as uncanny how similar some of
the scenarios in this piece of history sound to news
(02:09):
of today. And so the snapshot that it provides of
the South in the decades after the Civil War and
leading into the Jim Crow era is in some ways
startlingly familiar. Uh. And the book is also full of
racially charged language that was contemporary to the year that
the riot happened. There's a lot of relaying and reporting
(02:29):
and reprinting of things that were in the newspapers. That
was language we would never use today, and so we've
left those slurs out of today's recounting of those events. Um,
but even so, be forewarned that there is still some
truly horrifying violence that you kind of can't leave out
and still get the story across. So if you know violence,
(02:50):
particularly racially charged violence, is the kind of thing that
might be disturbing to you or that you might not want.
Maybe you're younger historians hearing this might be one to
skip out on. Robert Charles was born in late eighteen
sixty five or early eighteen sixty six. His mother was
actually carrying him when the United States Civil War ended.
Jasper and Mariah Charles's parents had been enslaved when they
(03:14):
conceived Robert, but they were free when he was born.
He was the couple's fourth child and their fourth son.
His life becomes really interesting because it really is sort
of this this parallel to the end of the Civil
War leading up to the turn of the century, and
both of Robert's parents had been born into slavery, so
(03:35):
when they were newly freed, it was the first time
they had ever been free, and they made a life
for themselves as sharecroppers on a cotton plantation in Mississippi,
and it's unknown whether they leased that land from the
person who had previously owned them or not. Share crapping
at this time was a system where a family could
get by, but really just barely. Most of the freed
(03:56):
former slaves who wanted to raise crops did not have
them any to get started because they had previously been enslaves,
so they had to rent their land, which was basically
what sharecropping amounts to. In addition to owing the ongoing
lease on the fields that they were working, a lot
of them also had crop leads, which gave a merchant
(04:18):
who provided their supplies to them, the first claim on
any of the crops that were harvested, and often that
merchant that they had a crop lead with was also
the person that owned their land and was renting it
to them, So it was not uncommon for a farmer
to basically owe most, if not all, of their income
from raising crops to the merchant and landowner, and most
(04:42):
families accrued significant debt in the seasons in between harvests
as they depended on these supplies from their merchant to
keep their families basic needs. Meant so Robert and his siblings.
His parents had six more children after he was born,
uh and another who they took on and was reportedly
their grandchild who they raised. They grew up in a
(05:03):
system where prosperity was systematically unattainable for them. Yeah, there's
there's a lot written I should say in that book
that I cited just a moment ago that suggests that
the Charles family did pretty well, um in relation to
some other families. They did not get above a poverty level,
(05:23):
but they were kind of able to to keep things
even and not fall deeper and deeper and deeper into
debt as some of the farmers in the area did.
And at the same time, as we've discussed many times
on this podcast, there was significant tumult and violence as
the country moved through the reconstruction era and led into
the Jim Crow era and for a while, Capaya County,
(05:46):
where the Charles family lived, was actually a little bit
unique in that it had a fairly even split between
black and white farmers, and there was a surprising level
of cooperation between the races. There was a local white
politician named John Prentis Matthews who went went by print,
who organized a coalition of black and white farmers known
(06:06):
as the Independent Party. Unfortunately, though, that coalition broke down
during the financial stress and racial tensions that engulfed the
country during the during reconstruction. Tensions were so great during
the weeks leading up to the elections of eighty three
that black members of the community who were politically active
(06:27):
received death threats, most often by groups of men who
broke into their homes to deliver those threats. Yeah, there
was this group called the Procession and they basically at
night would just walk through the streets, finding homes to
break into and threaten people that lived there. Uh. And
while Jassper Charles was an active voter pretty much from
(06:47):
the moment he became a freeman, he was not a
political leader, so he wasn't necessarily targeted by these groups,
but he still feared for his family's safety. And things
became so perilous and there had been some deaths that
the Charles family, several other black families, and a small
group of white families who supported this idea of coalition
(07:07):
all went into the woods to hide for safety. In
the last few days before the election. Print Matthews, that
politician who had organized this coalition party, was shot dead
while he was casting his ballot on election day, and
he was characterized in the days after as having quote
organized the Negro race against the whites of the county.
(07:29):
Many in Matthews supporters, both black and white, moved away
from Capaia County after the election day murder. This exodus
actually turned into a pretty big burden for the economy
of the area. Much of the farmland was based on
this debt heavy system that benefited the landowners, and having
so many of their renters move away, many of them
(07:50):
leaving their debts behind, led to a real cost. But
there were also plenty of people who felt like the
gain of having black people leave the county was worth it.
And at this point, Robert Charles was seventeen and there's
been a lot of speculation over the years about whether
he was multi racial or not, based on both drawings
(08:11):
and descriptive accounts of him. Um So if you ever
see that come up, know though that he always self
identified just simply as black. He didn't factor in any
other possible lineage, and he actually stayed in Capaia County
after that election, but only for a few more years.
In eighteen eighty seven, he moved to Vicksburg, Mississippi, to
(08:32):
look for employment. He worked for a while at the
Vicksburg Waterworks Company and eventually settled into position in the Louisville,
New Orleans and Texas Railroad starting in eight In May
of eight two, Robert and his brother Henry were involved
in an incident involving gunplay at a train depot in
(08:52):
Rolling Fork, which is forty miles north of itz Vicksburg.
A young black man had stolen a pistol from Robert,
and he and his brother had gone armed to retrieve it,
and that weapon that had been stolen had changed hands.
The trains flagman had it when they reached Rolling Fork,
and when Robert and Henry attempted to take it back,
the flagman fired on them and they returned fire. The
(09:15):
flagman eventually tossed the contested pistol from the train as
it was departing, and the Charles brothers retrieved it. No
one was hurt, but this incident would be characterized very
differently in later years. When the riot situation happened, this
got reported completely wrong. As like he had killed a
train worker. Like they're just completely um ludicrous exaggerations of
(09:42):
what had happened. This was one of those things that
came back after he became sort of a a known
entity and got told in embellished at bizarre ways. Even
at the time, though, Robert was afraid that even though
there had been no injuries, as a black man who
had shot at a white man, he was basically doomed
he if he stayed at this railroad job. So he
(10:03):
changed his name to Curtis Robertson and moved back to
Capayah County. In his life there seems to have been
relatively uneventful. Um. There's not a lot of documentation on it,
until he was arrested for selling liquor in a dry
county in fall of eighteen four and he pled guilty
and he was fined forty dollars plus costs, And while
(10:24):
he was supposed to stay in jail until he could
come up with that money, he managed to convince the
judge to bypass that directive, probably so that he could
raise funds more easily. But he didn't pay that fine
and instead he left for New Orleans. An arrest warrant
was issued in eighteen nine five for the delinquent Curtis Robertson,
although it doesn't seem that anyone actually pursued him. Then,
(10:48):
in October of eighteen ninety six, he appeared voluntarily in
court before the same judge. He pleaded innocent to the
exact same charges that he had been convicted for in
eighteen ninety four. This whole episode is a little confusing,
the records on it are not complete, but he ultimately
was cleared of the charges, although he opted to once
again go to New Orleans instead of staying in Kapaiah
(11:10):
County where he had grown up. Yeah, there's debate over
what really took place there, if while he had been
free and had left for New Orleans, new evidence had
come up that led him to return and clear his name,
or if something else played out. But uh, his return
to New Orleans after this was all cleared up eventually
(11:31):
catalyzed an incredibly violent period of riots. But before we
get to that, we're gonna pause and take a breather
and get ready for it while we hear about one
of our fantastic sponsors. Perhaps the reason that Robert Charles
(11:54):
a k. A. Curtis Robertson was eager to go back
to New Orleans was the fact that he had earlier
in eight joined a group called the International Migration Society.
He had plans to move to Liberia, and he had
already started making payments on this planned move. Over the
next several years, he would slowly move away from using
his alias and return to his original name of Robert
(12:17):
Charles uh. And we've talked about on the podcast before
that there were different factions even within the black community,
about how to sort of deal with race relations. And
there there were some both black and white people who
thought the best thing would be for freed slaves to
move back to Africa, even though many of them had
(12:37):
never been to Africa before. Uh And, as we lead
into this, UH, this was a point in US history
where the police force in New Orleans was considered the
most overworked and porous paid in the nation. Um. While
the city in nineteen hundred had more than three hundred
thousand residents, it had three hundred and fifteen policemen. Fewer
(12:59):
than two hundred of those were revealable for patrols. So
there was a setup where even though they made less
money in a lot of times than sort of unskilled
labor on the railroad. There were lots of people that
wanted to work for the police department, but there really
weren't funds to hire them, and so even if they
were working twelve hour shifts, two shifts a day, there
(13:20):
were still fewer than a hundred officers to cover the
entire um square mileage of the city in that time.
So one of the things that comes up in incarnival
Fury is the idea that it was actually pretty startling
that the violent crime rate was really pretty low in
New Orleans. There were a lot of petty crimes, but
not a lot of violent crimes. At this point, race
(13:43):
relations in New Orleans were as complicated as they were
anywhere else in the South and the rest of the country.
At this point, while in some neighborhoods white and black
working class citizens lived in fairly integrated circumstances, the belief
that black people were inferior was as common as anywhere
else in those neighborhoods. There was even one New Orleans newspaper, States,
(14:06):
which was the official journal of city government, that routinely
featured anti black writings by its editor, Henry J. Hearsey,
who firmly believed that the only way to solve the
race problem was to use his own word extermination. His
writings are exactly as horrific as you're probably thinking. UM,
(14:28):
and all of this is kind of a setup to
give insight into why Robert Charles as well as UH
some other people of color planned to move to Liberia.
And as it turned out, the International Migration Society folded in.
There is a very high likelihood that it had been
largely in operation in which its white organizers collected monthly
(14:49):
dues from black people in exchange for the promise of travel.
So I know you already said, but I kind of
want to say again that there were so many different
organizations talking about UH relocating to Liberia, working from so
many different perspectives, with so many different UH motivations. Like
there were definitely organizations that were explicitly racist, that were like,
(15:11):
we need the black people to leave, But then there
were also people who were advocating for themselves, saying, Okay,
we're never going to have a fair life here, so
we should leave. So, like, I don't want to paint
the entire movement based on this one an organization that
there were so many different perspectives on it. Robert Charles,
for his part, might not have realized that the I
(15:33):
M S was at worst a flam flam operation and
at best just poorly run. After the organization folded and
then reorganized under the name of Liberia Colonization Society, he
routinely wrote to one of the organizers uh and distributed
literature on behalf of the society all throughout Louisiana and Mississippi.
(15:53):
He might have been not aware that the person that
he was writing to was not actually black. Yeah, that
comes up as one of the things. It seems like
these people were running this society but not really working
with the people that they were collecting money from. And
allegedly they did send a couple of trips to Liberia,
(16:15):
but completely underprepared, unfunded, and most of the people that
went on those trips died shortly after they arrived in Africa,
either from malnutrition or some illness that they contracted on
the voyage. So even if it was kind of on
the up and up, it was just not well organized
at all. Charles also began working with Bishop Henry M.
(16:35):
Turner of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Atlanta, and
he asked to be a subscription agent for Voice of Missions,
which was a monthly periodical that the Bishop produced. Turner
was also a proponent of the Back to Africa cause,
and Voice of Missions was one of his primary methods
for spreading the ideology that a new beginning in Liberia
was the best next step for black people in the
(16:57):
United States. In June hundred, Robert Charles was laid off
from his job. He had been working in a lumber yard.
He had a very small income from selling copies of
the Voice of Missions, but to conserve as much money
as he could, he asked a young man named Leonard
Pierce to rent a room with him so that the
two of them could split the cost. Yeah, Leonard Pierce
(17:19):
was only nineteen. He was very young, um and that
would of course change his life forever. On July twenty three,
d Robert Charles invited his roommate Leonard to go meet
two women with him for sort of a double date.
And Charles, at this point was already dressed and Pierce,
who had just gotten home from work, washed up and
(17:39):
also dressed to go out. Both men were armed, which
was not at all unusual at the time. The two
of them first went to visit Robert's sister Alice, and
then to Dryad Street, where the two women, Virginia Banks
and Ernestine Goldstein, rented a room from a white woman
named Mrs Cooley. Robert had told Leonard that the ladies
had been out on an excursion that day and that
(18:00):
they would be back late. This wasn't actually the case.
Although we really don't know if this was a purposeful
deception or not, it's kind of likely that Charles was
hoping to wait until Mrs Cooley was asleep to then
try to gain admittance to the home to visit with
Banks and Goldstein. Yeah, just like if you have ever
(18:21):
gone as a teenager to see one of your friends
or someone you had a crush on late at night
and tapped on their window to try to get in
secretly without their parents knowing. It was kind of like
that situation. Uh. And while the two men waited for
the ladies, who were in fact in their rented room,
throughout the evening, they sat on the steps of another
house on the street at fifteen Dryads Street, New Orleans,
(18:46):
New Orleans. P D Sergeant Jules C. Cohen was told
according to his account, that a pair of suspicious looking
black men were hanging around on the steps of a
white family on Dryad Street. He whistled to summon two
other officers, Joseph Cantrell and August Mora, to go investigate
this with him, and, according to Mara's later testimony, which
(19:08):
remained the most consistent throughout multiple tellings, in the aftermath
of Anyone's the trio approached Charles and Pierce, and they
inquired as to why they were lingering there on the
steps of a house that was not theirs. And as
the officers neared the pair on the steps, Robert Charles
stood up. So Robert Charles was pretty tall, about six ft,
(19:28):
and Maura took his standing up as an aggressive gesture.
He grabbed Charles and after a minor scuffle, beat him
with his baton. Which of the men drew his gun
first is completely unknown. More actually relayed this story both ways,
but both men ultimately fired shots and both were injured.
Cantrell had also fired his weapon, and it's unknown whether
(19:51):
his shot or Maura's hit Robert Charles in the thigh.
And throughout all of this, Leonard Pierce had sat motionless
and terrified on the steps. Cohen had held him at gunpoint,
and so Pierce did not see all of the details
of this Mora Charles altercation that it was playing out.
Charles led the scene and made his way to his
(20:13):
apartment at Street Pierce. He was frightened and crying, gave
the police the address, and a patrol wagon arrived there
at three am on July. As they approached the room,
they saw that the door was open a crack, and
when they called out to Robert Charles to open up,
he emerged and he shot Captain John T. Day dead.
(20:36):
Then he shot the patrolman, Peter J. Lamb, in the head.
Charles then retreated into his room and shut the door,
and according to accounts, he could be heard reloading his
Winchester rifle. Another tenant of that same house, a woman,
opened her door and she ushered the remaining two police
officers who had gone into the building, Julesia Cohen and
(20:58):
Ernest Trenchard, into her room, and they sheltered there with
her for two full hours. At the same time, several
officers outside had remained in place, at one point calling
out to inquire if they needed to go in. They
new assistance inside the house, but they didn't ultimately enter
the house. At four thirty, Charles emerged from the home
(21:19):
and fired at one of the officers, grazing his cap.
Both of the policemen ran away, and they would later
testify that they had been looking for a telephone. They
did actually phone in the precinct from a nearby drug store.
Yeah that whether or not they were running away from
him in fear for safety or whether they were actually
(21:40):
looking for the telephone comes up a little bit later,
but by daybreak it appeared that Robert Charles had left
the premises, and word quickly spread through both the neighborhood
and the police force what had happened, and Fourth Street
quickly became crowded with both officers and onlookers, and a
massive manhunt ensued. So New Orleans, already fraught with racial tension,
(22:04):
became a powder keg of violence. Initially, there were calls
to go to the precinct, take pierced and lynch him.
The police moved into the parish prison to try to
protect him, and at that point almost any black man
became a suspect. The various mobs that started circling in
the streets before July was over. Multiple black men and
(22:26):
two black women had been beaten by mobs, and another
armed group of vigilantes was dispersed by a lie. This
was basically a quick thinking gamble that an alderman told them,
saying that Robert Charles had been arrested in a nearby town,
which caused the crowd to break up. They were seemingly
satisfied by the knowledge that he had been arrested, but
this was really just the calm before the storm. Yeah.
(22:49):
The next day, as it became known that Charles was
in fact not in custody, anger raged anew and the
acting mayor at the time the regular mayor was away,
was keenly aware of the potential for this situation to
very quickly get out of hand, so he issued the
following proclamation, Whereas as a result of the regrettable assassination
(23:12):
of Captain Day and Officer Lamb, and the wounding of
Officer Moura, there is a disposition manifested on the part
of certain of our citizens to take the law into
their own hands, much to the prejudice of the good
name of the City of New Orleans. Now Therefore, I
William Malee, Acting mayor call upon good citizens to aid
the authorities in preserving the peace, not to assemble on
(23:35):
public streets and places discussing the sad events here and
above set forth, but to let justice take its course.
But there was so much anger and tension that this
proclamation did no good. Unfortunately, some of the city's papers
also ran incredibly incendiary pieces that suggested that all black
people were part of a larger problem that had culminated
(23:58):
in Robert Charles's actions. The Henry Heirsey Paper states that
we mentioned earlier Lad to a Frenzy when it ran
a fearmongering editorial on the afternoon of July about the
dangerous quote regime of the free negro that threatened the
safety of a white society. And we're gonna pause here
(24:19):
for a word from a sponsor, because things will take
a very ugly turn. Uh. So we're gonna have that
little break so we can get ready, and then we
will jump into the last part of the story. Today's
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Square Space set your website apart. So as a bit
of fair warning, the grizzlier aspects of this tale take
place here in the last segment, So brace yourselves or
(25:46):
tap out if you think it might be too much
for you or any younger history buffs, or maybe review
it before you share it with younger listeners who might
be listening. Basically, the rioting that night was horrifying. The
mob first emboled at a monument to Robert E. Lee
with a plan to march to the parish prison and
take Leonard pierced by force. Along the way to the prison,
(26:08):
assaults started on Any black person, including women and the elderly,
who was unfortunate enough to be in the path of
this mob found themselves in grave danger. And as this
mob was walking through the streets and would encounter street
cars that were carrying people home for the evening, they
would stop those cars and board them, and any black
(26:29):
citizens found aboard were beaten or in many cases shot
dead at point blank range. By the time the violent
mob reached the prison, it consisted of three thousand people,
which were primarily young white men. The prison was barricaded
and defended by some of the city's most respected peacekeepers,
who made it very clear that they would not yield.
(26:50):
The mob eventually moved on from its original objective and
instead headed to the black entertainment venues, found them closed
and deserted, so the splintered into smaller groups of vigilantes.
As the night were on searching out additional victims, and
as the sun came up on the the numbers of
rioters actually swelled as some who had left the night
(27:13):
before when things started to splinter apart once again joined
the violent herd, apparently after they had gone home and
gotten some rest. So over the course of the next
twelve hours, the government made a call to citizens to
form a special police force to help quell the violence
and try to restore the city to peace. Some offers
of assistance that came in had clearly missed the message.
(27:35):
They did not get that the idea was to stop violence.
They were hoping that the government was going to sanction
their desires to annihilate all of New Orleans Black community.
The night of was still marked by violence. Both beatings
and murders still happened that night, although the assembled militia
was slowly gaining control of the city, but after three
(27:58):
days of searching, at this point, Robert Charles was still
at large, and he had in fact been in one
place the entire time that these waves of mob violence
had been sweeping through New Orleans. He had sought refuge
with friends and they had granted it. But on Friday
July a tip came in from a black informer to
the Superintendent of Police. A family named Jackson was harboring
(28:23):
him at their renting home at twelve o eight Saratoga Street.
Robert Charles had known the Jackson's for several years, and
many people had seen him visit in the Saratoga Street house.
Sergeant Gabriel Portius was dispatched to check out the tip,
and Portius had actually been one of the men who
had defended the prison and kept rioters away from Pierce,
(28:44):
and he was an incredibly well respected policeman by both
black and white citizens. He was considered unusually fair in
his treatment of everyone he encountered on his job. When
Robert Charles got wind that the police were on Saratoga Street,
he hid with his rifle in a claw it. He
had a portable furnace for casting bullets, and he had
been melting down lead pipe to make his ammunition. So
(29:08):
Porteus and Corporal John f Lally once they had made
their way to the Jackson home, questions silence Jackson about
Robert Charles, and Jackson claimed to have no knowledge of
the man, but the policeman believed that he was actually
Charles's brother. There was some confusion and they placed him
under arrest, and they were walking him into the house.
(29:30):
Charles emerged from the closet where he had been hiding
and he shot both officers Porteus and Lally. Portius died
almost immediately, but Lally held on for a little while,
and there was a moment of confusion as several men
ran from their homes in the area after hearing these shots. Initially,
two policemen who had been stationed in the street attempted
(29:50):
to arrest a man, thinking that he was Charles, but
then realizing he was simply somebody who lived nearby and
had been running in fear. Yeah, once those shots rang out,
I mean again, knowing what had been happening in the city,
pretty much everyone that was near uh this house ran
into the streets, and so everyone thought that all of
(30:10):
those people were Robert Charles fleeing. But Charles had not fled.
He had in fact gone into an upstairs bedroom, and
then he actually kicked a hole in the wall that
separated that bedroom from the adjoining bedroom to give himself
a wider range of vantage points. And initially it was
believed that Charles was gone, but then when he shot
at a white man who was standing in the yard below,
(30:32):
he revealed his position and a standoff began. So we
we don't know what he was thinking or what was
motivating him. But he has to have known at this
point that there was no way out, and it appears
that desperation of that knowledge incited this mindless violence, because
(30:52):
Robert Charles then began firing at white citizens. Mayor kept
a Villa, who had turned from his traveling and relieved.
The acting mayor, William Malee, made a declaration that the
authorities would fire gatling guns into the white mob that
was forming around this house if things got out of
(31:12):
hand again. So they were trying to prevent mob violence,
but just the same, an armed mob of approximately five
thousand formed in the neighborhood surrounding Charles's hideout, and the
numbers continued to swell, with estimates placing the number when
it topped out upwards of ten thousand people. During the conflict,
Charles was shot at thousands of times. The house was
(31:35):
severely damaged, but Charles snhow survived. He had fired his
weapon and estimated fifty times in the course of an
hour and forty minutes, and he had killed two additional
people and wounded nineteen others. Eventually, desperate to flush Charles
out from the residents, police snuck into the lower floor
of the residence and set a fire using a horse
hair mattress from the home, which they soaked in kerosene.
(31:58):
The hope was that the smoke would drive him out,
and a fire patrol captain that was with them dribbled
water on the mattress so that it would produce thick,
thick clouds of smoke. This actually worked, although the spreading
fire was really what drove Charles out. As Robert Charles
attempted to exit the residence, he was shot. He fell
and was shot several more times while trying to turn over,
(32:19):
still still clutching his weapon. Hail of bullets was unleashed
on his body by several men who were in the
room he had been attempting to leave through, and when
it was clear that he was dead and the ammunition
was running out among the men that were there at
close range, his body was dragged outside the house's front entrance.
A frenzy of dragging and beating the corpse and riddling
(32:43):
it with bullets then commenced. His body was then stomped,
and though the crowd wished to burn it, the police
stopped things there. Uh What was left of his remains
was then carried away on the police wagon, but as
they made their way through the streets, the crowd continued
to bat at his body with sticks. Many people chased
the wagon through the streets all the way to the morgue.
(33:05):
The night of despite the fact that it was quickly
common knowledge that Robert Charles was dead, two other black
men were killed in the street, and a black schoolhouse
was burned to the ground. The volunteer forces that had
been called to action earlier in the weeks stayed on
duty throughout Saturday and into the morning hours on Sunday
to try to deter further violence. On Sunday, which was July,
(33:30):
the body of Robert Charles was taken as discreetly as
possible to be buried in the city's Potter's Field, which
was whole cemetery. He was buried quickly without ceremony, and
the location of his grave was kept secret to prevent
any grizzly souvenir seekers from exhuming the body and cutting
it up and taking pieces away. The five officers who
(33:51):
had been at Charles's residence when he shot and killed
two of their fellow officers were all charged with cowardice
for failing to apprehend him at that time time, they
were all found guilty and dismissed from the force. All
of them appealed their verdict but lost. Yeah, so those
men that said that they were going to search for
a phone were still found guilty of cowardice for having
(34:13):
run away. Leonard Pierce was indicted on the charge of
attempting to murder police Sergeant A. Cohen. Ten people connected
to the incident at the Saratoga Street residents were arraigned,
although one of the men that was involved hanged himself
in his cell before indictments were handed down. Testimony by
Silas Jackson's wife, Martha, indicated that while she had taken
(34:35):
in Robert Charles for fear that he would hurt her
or her family if she didn't, neither Silence nor anyone
else had actually known that they were harboring him. Eventually,
only Silas, Martha and Charles Jackson were tried. Martha and
Charles were acquitted, and the jury returned a decision of
guilty for Silence, but that was for manslaughter. The judge
(34:57):
throughout that decision, saying that his only possible guilt would
have been for aiding and abetting. By May of nine
oh one, all of the Saratoga Street residents involved in
the case had been set free. Additionally, nine white men
were indicted for first degree murder in the mob violence
after numerous witnesses testified against them. Two other men were
(35:19):
indicted on charges of unlawful assembly in connection to the riots.
The actual trials were a mess of hung juries and
confused testimony and resulted basically an abandonment of the cases.
In June one, Leonard Pierce was released on bond, and
despite many scheduled hearings, none of them ever happened due
(35:41):
to schedule conflicts on the part of A. Cohen. Yeah,
they finally kind of gave up on the case. Uh.
And in the weeks following the riots in New Orleans
in July d there were numerous acts of violence around
the country that were attributed in one way or another
to the unrest associated with the Robert Charles incidents. A
final death toll attributed to Robert Charles's actions was four
(36:04):
white police officers and three civilians. Additionally, he had seriously
wounded eight people and slightly wounded a dozen more. Dozens
of black residents who had no connection to Robert Charles
other than being of the same race had been brutalized.
Many others, both black and white, had been injured by
the mobs who ran the streets of New Orleans in
(36:26):
search of vigilante justice. After the riots, the room that
Robert Charles had shared with Leonard Pierce was invaded by
both Press and Lucky Lose, many of them hoping to
carry away souvenirs. Among his personal effects were several textbooks
and composition books. And while one reporter examined the books
and determined that Charles was working on quote improving himself intellectually,
(36:49):
the writings of Robert Charles in those composition books was lost.
They were taken by unknown persons as souvenirs, and they
have never turned up in the record again. Robert Charles
had one white friend in New Orleans who was a
clothing store salesman named him and Levy and Charles, who
Levy only have our knew is Curtis Robertson regularly purchased
(37:13):
clothing from Levy's shop, and the two really came to
know and like one another. And it's interesting to note,
and this is very counter to most accounts and testimonies
that were given after all of this violence, happened. Uh
that the characterization of Charles as a bloodthirsty monster is
(37:33):
not one that Levy holds too. He always described him
really favorably as seemingly well educated and smart and with
excellent taste in clothes, And in fact, he was one
of the people that identified the body of Robert Charles
based on the clothes that he had been wearing, and
a lot of ways this is one of history's mysteries.
While we do know what happened in the various altercations
(37:56):
between Robert Charles and the police, we don't have any
clear records of his mindset or even his demeanor and
the days that led up to that first shooting on
July twenty three. Many of the statements of acquaintances who
vilified him are believed to have been given out of
fear by people of color who were basically trying to
(38:16):
distance themselves from his story basically is a means of
self preservation. Yeah, one of the women that he and
Pierce were going to meet was apparently, by some accounts,
his girlfriend, And when she was questioned, she really told
a terrible story that he was violent and that he
was had been violent with her, But that was the
(38:40):
first time that ever came up. And so there's some
theory that she was so terrified that if she was
associated with him and he had been going to meet
her that night, that she would somehow be implicated in
these crimes. That that account is often not considered reliable. Uh,
it's as I said at the beginning, it's a strange story,
(39:02):
and it's very complicated, and it's one that deserves thought.
You know, it causes me to reflect on kind of
how how things can quickly escalate and get out of
hand and happen without thoughts. And we have talked about
other events on the show that are often described as
(39:23):
as race riots, um, and a lot of times that
term is not really indicative of what really happened because
it makes it sound like there were multiple races involved
that were equal aggressors, and overwhelmingly that is not the case.
And even in this particular case, like you did have
(39:46):
one man who was horrifyingly killing police officers and civilians,
but then in terms of the riot that broke out,
that was definitely not something in which two sides were
equal aggressors. That was a it in which one side
was seeking vigilante justice. Yeah, yeah, pretty much. All of
(40:08):
the accounts suggests that basically every black person in New
Orleans at the time was hiding they were so terrified. Uh,
and with good reason that I can't imagine how frightening
that must have been. Um, would you like to move
on to non frightening listener mail? I wouldn't leave. Okay.
As I've said recently, we are working through a huge
(40:28):
stockpile of awesome postcards because while we have been traveling,
people have been traveling and sending us fabulous notes from
the road. Uh. So I will talk about a few
of them quickly here because I know this has been
a longish episode. First, our listener Paula has sent us
a few postcards, and two of them that I really
super love. One she sent us from Root sixty six
(40:49):
in Oatman because she ate at the Olive Oatman restaurant
and that made her think of the podcast that we
did on all of Oatman. The other one I super
de duper love. It is from the U. S. Basin
Rockets side Her, which is not especially super history oriented,
but um, she went to space camp and for some
reason this card made her think of US uh and
(41:09):
Martian fashion. So it is basically like a Journey to
Mars poster that's done in postcard size and it's lovely.
Who wouldn't want to think about Martian fashion? I certainly
want to, especially after horrifying episodes. So thank you, thank you,
thank you, Paula, like, it's so cool that you share
all of this travel with us. Uh. The other one
is from our listeners, Emily and Mark, and they say,
(41:31):
greetings from San Juan Island. We had planned a camping
trip here before one of us, which is apparently Emily,
stumbled upon your pig war episode while making our way
through your backlogs. We listened again on our way to
the island and visited both the English and American camps,
which are national historic parks. The park quote celebrates how
individuals and nations can resolve disputes without resorting to violence.
(41:54):
End quote, and then she put in parentheses but just
barely thank you for the fun and appropop podcast. So
they sent us a lovely postcard from San Juan Islands. Uh.
So that was lovely. Thank you, thank you, thank you too,
Paula and Emily and Mark. I hope your travels were
all safe. If you would like to write to us.
You can do so at history podcasts at how stuff
(42:16):
works dot com. You can also find us across the
spectrum of social media as missed in History. That's at
mist in History, on Twitter, Facebook dot com, slash mist
in History, Pinterest dot com, slash mist in History, Miston
History dot tumbler dot com, and on Instagram. At mist
in History. You can visit our parents site, which is
how stuff Works. You can research almost anything you like there.
(42:37):
Just put something into the search bar and you're gonna
come up with a ton of results which would be
interesting and fascinating. You can also find us at missed
in history dot com, where we have a backlog. We
have all of our episodes and an archive formats from
when the show first began. There are also show notes
for every episode that Tracy and I have worked on together.
Uh So, we encourage you come and visit us at
misston history dot com or how stuff works dot com
(43:04):
for more illness and thousands of other topics because it
how stuff works dot com, m
A quick note about today's episode. We originally started talking
about covering today's topic, which is the New Orleans race
riot of nine hundred, also known as the Robert Charles
Riots in July, following the police shootings of Filando Castile
and Alton Sterling and the July seventh attack on Dallas
police that killed five officers. Because the nine hundred riots
(00:21):
involved violence against both police and New Orleans black community,
it's an important piece of historical context, but also when
we wanted to wait to cover until a little time
had passed. We recorded today's episode on septem prior to
the police shootings of Tyree King, Terence Crutcher, and Keith
Lamont Scott. Welcome to Steph you missed in history class
(00:44):
from how works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
And I'm Tray Steve Wilson, and today we're talking about
a really complex p of history and it's one that
Tracy and I discussed whether or not we should do
it for a while, and I kind of back burnered
(01:05):
it for a little bit because of recent race racial
strife in our own country, But that also makes it
kind of an important moment to examine and look at Yeah,
it have definite parallels to a number of uh, relatively
recent events. It does. The main person in this story, too,
is is a little bit difficult because his name is
(01:27):
Robert Charles, and he's been characterized all across the spectrum
from a villainous monster to a sort of martyr figure. Uh.
And in nine he committed some very horrible violent acts
in a racially charged uh sort of moment in New
Orleans history, and we don't really know why he did this.
(01:47):
And there is, I should say, right up front, a
lot of violence in this story, committed by a lot
of different people. Um. And in reading the source that
I primarily used for the subject, which is a book
called Carnival of Fury, It was written by William Ivy Hare,
it really struck me as uncanny how similar some of
the scenarios in this piece of history sound to news
(02:09):
of today. And so the snapshot that it provides of
the South in the decades after the Civil War and
leading into the Jim Crow era is in some ways
startlingly familiar. Uh. And the book is also full of
racially charged language that was contemporary to the year that
the riot happened. There's a lot of relaying and reporting
(02:29):
and reprinting of things that were in the newspapers. That
was language we would never use today, and so we've
left those slurs out of today's recounting of those events. Um,
but even so, be forewarned that there is still some
truly horrifying violence that you kind of can't leave out
and still get the story across. So if you know violence,
(02:50):
particularly racially charged violence, is the kind of thing that
might be disturbing to you or that you might not want.
Maybe you're younger historians hearing this might be one to
skip out on. Robert Charles was born in late eighteen
sixty five or early eighteen sixty six. His mother was
actually carrying him when the United States Civil War ended.
Jasper and Mariah Charles's parents had been enslaved when they
(03:14):
conceived Robert, but they were free when he was born.
He was the couple's fourth child and their fourth son.
His life becomes really interesting because it really is sort
of this this parallel to the end of the Civil
War leading up to the turn of the century, and
both of Robert's parents had been born into slavery, so
(03:35):
when they were newly freed, it was the first time
they had ever been free, and they made a life
for themselves as sharecroppers on a cotton plantation in Mississippi,
and it's unknown whether they leased that land from the
person who had previously owned them or not. Share crapping
at this time was a system where a family could
get by, but really just barely. Most of the freed
(03:56):
former slaves who wanted to raise crops did not have
them any to get started because they had previously been enslaves,
so they had to rent their land, which was basically
what sharecropping amounts to. In addition to owing the ongoing
lease on the fields that they were working, a lot
of them also had crop leads, which gave a merchant
(04:18):
who provided their supplies to them, the first claim on
any of the crops that were harvested, and often that
merchant that they had a crop lead with was also
the person that owned their land and was renting it
to them, So it was not uncommon for a farmer
to basically owe most, if not all, of their income
from raising crops to the merchant and landowner, and most
(04:42):
families accrued significant debt in the seasons in between harvests
as they depended on these supplies from their merchant to
keep their families basic needs. Meant so Robert and his siblings.
His parents had six more children after he was born,
uh and another who they took on and was reportedly
their grandchild who they raised. They grew up in a
(05:03):
system where prosperity was systematically unattainable for them. Yeah, there's
there's a lot written I should say in that book
that I cited just a moment ago that suggests that
the Charles family did pretty well, um in relation to
some other families. They did not get above a poverty level,
(05:23):
but they were kind of able to to keep things
even and not fall deeper and deeper and deeper into
debt as some of the farmers in the area did.
And at the same time, as we've discussed many times
on this podcast, there was significant tumult and violence as
the country moved through the reconstruction era and led into
the Jim Crow era and for a while, Capaya County,
(05:46):
where the Charles family lived, was actually a little bit
unique in that it had a fairly even split between
black and white farmers, and there was a surprising level
of cooperation between the races. There was a local white
politician named John Prentis Matthews who went went by print,
who organized a coalition of black and white farmers known
(06:06):
as the Independent Party. Unfortunately, though, that coalition broke down
during the financial stress and racial tensions that engulfed the
country during the during reconstruction. Tensions were so great during
the weeks leading up to the elections of eighty three
that black members of the community who were politically active
(06:27):
received death threats, most often by groups of men who
broke into their homes to deliver those threats. Yeah, there
was this group called the Procession and they basically at
night would just walk through the streets, finding homes to
break into and threaten people that lived there. Uh. And
while Jassper Charles was an active voter pretty much from
(06:47):
the moment he became a freeman, he was not a
political leader, so he wasn't necessarily targeted by these groups,
but he still feared for his family's safety. And things
became so perilous and there had been some deaths that
the Charles family, several other black families, and a small
group of white families who supported this idea of coalition
(07:07):
all went into the woods to hide for safety. In
the last few days before the election. Print Matthews, that
politician who had organized this coalition party, was shot dead
while he was casting his ballot on election day, and
he was characterized in the days after as having quote
organized the Negro race against the whites of the county.
(07:29):
Many in Matthews supporters, both black and white, moved away
from Capaia County after the election day murder. This exodus
actually turned into a pretty big burden for the economy
of the area. Much of the farmland was based on
this debt heavy system that benefited the landowners, and having
so many of their renters move away, many of them
(07:50):
leaving their debts behind, led to a real cost. But
there were also plenty of people who felt like the
gain of having black people leave the county was worth it.
And at this point, Robert Charles was seventeen and there's
been a lot of speculation over the years about whether
he was multi racial or not, based on both drawings
(08:11):
and descriptive accounts of him. Um So if you ever
see that come up, know though that he always self
identified just simply as black. He didn't factor in any
other possible lineage, and he actually stayed in Capaia County
after that election, but only for a few more years.
In eighteen eighty seven, he moved to Vicksburg, Mississippi, to
(08:32):
look for employment. He worked for a while at the
Vicksburg Waterworks Company and eventually settled into position in the Louisville,
New Orleans and Texas Railroad starting in eight In May
of eight two, Robert and his brother Henry were involved
in an incident involving gunplay at a train depot in
(08:52):
Rolling Fork, which is forty miles north of itz Vicksburg.
A young black man had stolen a pistol from Robert,
and he and his brother had gone armed to retrieve it,
and that weapon that had been stolen had changed hands.
The trains flagman had it when they reached Rolling Fork,
and when Robert and Henry attempted to take it back,
the flagman fired on them and they returned fire. The
(09:15):
flagman eventually tossed the contested pistol from the train as
it was departing, and the Charles brothers retrieved it. No
one was hurt, but this incident would be characterized very
differently in later years. When the riot situation happened, this
got reported completely wrong. As like he had killed a
train worker. Like they're just completely um ludicrous exaggerations of
(09:42):
what had happened. This was one of those things that
came back after he became sort of a a known
entity and got told in embellished at bizarre ways. Even
at the time, though, Robert was afraid that even though
there had been no injuries, as a black man who
had shot at a white man, he was basically doomed
he if he stayed at this railroad job. So he
(10:03):
changed his name to Curtis Robertson and moved back to
Capayah County. In his life there seems to have been
relatively uneventful. Um. There's not a lot of documentation on it,
until he was arrested for selling liquor in a dry
county in fall of eighteen four and he pled guilty
and he was fined forty dollars plus costs, And while
(10:24):
he was supposed to stay in jail until he could
come up with that money, he managed to convince the
judge to bypass that directive, probably so that he could
raise funds more easily. But he didn't pay that fine
and instead he left for New Orleans. An arrest warrant
was issued in eighteen nine five for the delinquent Curtis Robertson,
although it doesn't seem that anyone actually pursued him. Then,
(10:48):
in October of eighteen ninety six, he appeared voluntarily in
court before the same judge. He pleaded innocent to the
exact same charges that he had been convicted for in
eighteen ninety four. This whole episode is a little confusing,
the records on it are not complete, but he ultimately
was cleared of the charges, although he opted to once
again go to New Orleans instead of staying in Kapaiah
(11:10):
County where he had grown up. Yeah, there's debate over
what really took place there, if while he had been
free and had left for New Orleans, new evidence had
come up that led him to return and clear his name,
or if something else played out. But uh, his return
to New Orleans after this was all cleared up eventually
(11:31):
catalyzed an incredibly violent period of riots. But before we
get to that, we're gonna pause and take a breather
and get ready for it while we hear about one
of our fantastic sponsors. Perhaps the reason that Robert Charles
(11:54):
a k. A. Curtis Robertson was eager to go back
to New Orleans was the fact that he had earlier
in eight joined a group called the International Migration Society.
He had plans to move to Liberia, and he had
already started making payments on this planned move. Over the
next several years, he would slowly move away from using
his alias and return to his original name of Robert
(12:17):
Charles uh. And we've talked about on the podcast before
that there were different factions even within the black community,
about how to sort of deal with race relations. And
there there were some both black and white people who
thought the best thing would be for freed slaves to
move back to Africa, even though many of them had
(12:37):
never been to Africa before. Uh And, as we lead
into this, UH, this was a point in US history
where the police force in New Orleans was considered the
most overworked and porous paid in the nation. Um. While
the city in nineteen hundred had more than three hundred
thousand residents, it had three hundred and fifteen policemen. Fewer
(12:59):
than two hundred of those were revealable for patrols. So
there was a setup where even though they made less
money in a lot of times than sort of unskilled
labor on the railroad. There were lots of people that
wanted to work for the police department, but there really
weren't funds to hire them, and so even if they
were working twelve hour shifts, two shifts a day, there
(13:20):
were still fewer than a hundred officers to cover the
entire um square mileage of the city in that time.
So one of the things that comes up in incarnival
Fury is the idea that it was actually pretty startling
that the violent crime rate was really pretty low in
New Orleans. There were a lot of petty crimes, but
not a lot of violent crimes. At this point, race
(13:43):
relations in New Orleans were as complicated as they were
anywhere else in the South and the rest of the country.
At this point, while in some neighborhoods white and black
working class citizens lived in fairly integrated circumstances, the belief
that black people were inferior was as common as anywhere
else in those neighborhoods. There was even one New Orleans newspaper, States,
(14:06):
which was the official journal of city government, that routinely
featured anti black writings by its editor, Henry J. Hearsey,
who firmly believed that the only way to solve the
race problem was to use his own word extermination. His
writings are exactly as horrific as you're probably thinking. UM,
(14:28):
and all of this is kind of a setup to
give insight into why Robert Charles as well as UH
some other people of color planned to move to Liberia.
And as it turned out, the International Migration Society folded in.
There is a very high likelihood that it had been
largely in operation in which its white organizers collected monthly
(14:49):
dues from black people in exchange for the promise of travel.
So I know you already said, but I kind of
want to say again that there were so many different
organizations talking about UH relocating to Liberia, working from so
many different perspectives, with so many different UH motivations. Like
there were definitely organizations that were explicitly racist, that were like,
(15:11):
we need the black people to leave, But then there
were also people who were advocating for themselves, saying, Okay,
we're never going to have a fair life here, so
we should leave. So, like, I don't want to paint
the entire movement based on this one an organization that
there were so many different perspectives on it. Robert Charles,
for his part, might not have realized that the I
(15:33):
M S was at worst a flam flam operation and
at best just poorly run. After the organization folded and
then reorganized under the name of Liberia Colonization Society, he
routinely wrote to one of the organizers uh and distributed
literature on behalf of the society all throughout Louisiana and Mississippi.
(15:53):
He might have been not aware that the person that
he was writing to was not actually black. Yeah, that
comes up as one of the things. It seems like
these people were running this society but not really working
with the people that they were collecting money from. And
allegedly they did send a couple of trips to Liberia,
(16:15):
but completely underprepared, unfunded, and most of the people that
went on those trips died shortly after they arrived in Africa,
either from malnutrition or some illness that they contracted on
the voyage. So even if it was kind of on
the up and up, it was just not well organized
at all. Charles also began working with Bishop Henry M.
(16:35):
Turner of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Atlanta, and
he asked to be a subscription agent for Voice of Missions,
which was a monthly periodical that the Bishop produced. Turner
was also a proponent of the Back to Africa cause,
and Voice of Missions was one of his primary methods
for spreading the ideology that a new beginning in Liberia
was the best next step for black people in the
(16:57):
United States. In June hundred, Robert Charles was laid off
from his job. He had been working in a lumber yard.
He had a very small income from selling copies of
the Voice of Missions, but to conserve as much money
as he could, he asked a young man named Leonard
Pierce to rent a room with him so that the
two of them could split the cost. Yeah, Leonard Pierce
(17:19):
was only nineteen. He was very young, um and that
would of course change his life forever. On July twenty three,
d Robert Charles invited his roommate Leonard to go meet
two women with him for sort of a double date.
And Charles, at this point was already dressed and Pierce,
who had just gotten home from work, washed up and
(17:39):
also dressed to go out. Both men were armed, which
was not at all unusual at the time. The two
of them first went to visit Robert's sister Alice, and
then to Dryad Street, where the two women, Virginia Banks
and Ernestine Goldstein, rented a room from a white woman
named Mrs Cooley. Robert had told Leonard that the ladies
had been out on an excursion that day and that
(18:00):
they would be back late. This wasn't actually the case.
Although we really don't know if this was a purposeful
deception or not, it's kind of likely that Charles was
hoping to wait until Mrs Cooley was asleep to then
try to gain admittance to the home to visit with
Banks and Goldstein. Yeah, just like if you have ever
(18:21):
gone as a teenager to see one of your friends
or someone you had a crush on late at night
and tapped on their window to try to get in
secretly without their parents knowing. It was kind of like
that situation. Uh. And while the two men waited for
the ladies, who were in fact in their rented room,
throughout the evening, they sat on the steps of another
house on the street at fifteen Dryads Street, New Orleans,
(18:46):
New Orleans. P D Sergeant Jules C. Cohen was told
according to his account, that a pair of suspicious looking
black men were hanging around on the steps of a
white family on Dryad Street. He whistled to summon two
other officers, Joseph Cantrell and August Mora, to go investigate
this with him, and, according to Mara's later testimony, which
(19:08):
remained the most consistent throughout multiple tellings, in the aftermath
of Anyone's the trio approached Charles and Pierce, and they
inquired as to why they were lingering there on the
steps of a house that was not theirs. And as
the officers neared the pair on the steps, Robert Charles
stood up. So Robert Charles was pretty tall, about six ft,
(19:28):
and Maura took his standing up as an aggressive gesture.
He grabbed Charles and after a minor scuffle, beat him
with his baton. Which of the men drew his gun
first is completely unknown. More actually relayed this story both ways,
but both men ultimately fired shots and both were injured.
Cantrell had also fired his weapon, and it's unknown whether
(19:51):
his shot or Maura's hit Robert Charles in the thigh.
And throughout all of this, Leonard Pierce had sat motionless
and terrified on the steps. Cohen had held him at gunpoint,
and so Pierce did not see all of the details
of this Mora Charles altercation that it was playing out.
Charles led the scene and made his way to his
(20:13):
apartment at Street Pierce. He was frightened and crying, gave
the police the address, and a patrol wagon arrived there
at three am on July. As they approached the room,
they saw that the door was open a crack, and
when they called out to Robert Charles to open up,
he emerged and he shot Captain John T. Day dead.
(20:36):
Then he shot the patrolman, Peter J. Lamb, in the head.
Charles then retreated into his room and shut the door,
and according to accounts, he could be heard reloading his
Winchester rifle. Another tenant of that same house, a woman,
opened her door and she ushered the remaining two police
officers who had gone into the building, Julesia Cohen and
(20:58):
Ernest Trenchard, into her room, and they sheltered there with
her for two full hours. At the same time, several
officers outside had remained in place, at one point calling
out to inquire if they needed to go in. They
new assistance inside the house, but they didn't ultimately enter
the house. At four thirty, Charles emerged from the home
(21:19):
and fired at one of the officers, grazing his cap.
Both of the policemen ran away, and they would later
testify that they had been looking for a telephone. They
did actually phone in the precinct from a nearby drug store.
Yeah that whether or not they were running away from
him in fear for safety or whether they were actually
(21:40):
looking for the telephone comes up a little bit later,
but by daybreak it appeared that Robert Charles had left
the premises, and word quickly spread through both the neighborhood
and the police force what had happened, and Fourth Street
quickly became crowded with both officers and onlookers, and a
massive manhunt ensued. So New Orleans, already fraught with racial tension,
(22:04):
became a powder keg of violence. Initially, there were calls
to go to the precinct, take pierced and lynch him.
The police moved into the parish prison to try to
protect him, and at that point almost any black man
became a suspect. The various mobs that started circling in
the streets before July was over. Multiple black men and
(22:26):
two black women had been beaten by mobs, and another
armed group of vigilantes was dispersed by a lie. This
was basically a quick thinking gamble that an alderman told them,
saying that Robert Charles had been arrested in a nearby town,
which caused the crowd to break up. They were seemingly
satisfied by the knowledge that he had been arrested, but
this was really just the calm before the storm. Yeah.
(22:49):
The next day, as it became known that Charles was
in fact not in custody, anger raged anew and the
acting mayor at the time the regular mayor was away,
was keenly aware of the potential for this situation to
very quickly get out of hand, so he issued the
following proclamation, Whereas as a result of the regrettable assassination
(23:12):
of Captain Day and Officer Lamb, and the wounding of
Officer Moura, there is a disposition manifested on the part
of certain of our citizens to take the law into
their own hands, much to the prejudice of the good
name of the City of New Orleans. Now Therefore, I
William Malee, Acting mayor call upon good citizens to aid
the authorities in preserving the peace, not to assemble on
(23:35):
public streets and places discussing the sad events here and
above set forth, but to let justice take its course.
But there was so much anger and tension that this
proclamation did no good. Unfortunately, some of the city's papers
also ran incredibly incendiary pieces that suggested that all black
people were part of a larger problem that had culminated
(23:58):
in Robert Charles's actions. The Henry Heirsey Paper states that
we mentioned earlier Lad to a Frenzy when it ran
a fearmongering editorial on the afternoon of July about the
dangerous quote regime of the free negro that threatened the
safety of a white society. And we're gonna pause here
(24:19):
for a word from a sponsor, because things will take
a very ugly turn. Uh. So we're gonna have that
little break so we can get ready, and then we
will jump into the last part of the story. Today's
podcast is brought to you by Square Space. Whether you
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(24:40):
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Square Space set your website apart. So as a bit
of fair warning, the grizzlier aspects of this tale take
place here in the last segment, So brace yourselves or
(25:46):
tap out if you think it might be too much
for you or any younger history buffs, or maybe review
it before you share it with younger listeners who might
be listening. Basically, the rioting that night was horrifying. The
mob first emboled at a monument to Robert E. Lee
with a plan to march to the parish prison and
take Leonard pierced by force. Along the way to the prison,
(26:08):
assaults started on Any black person, including women and the elderly,
who was unfortunate enough to be in the path of
this mob found themselves in grave danger. And as this
mob was walking through the streets and would encounter street
cars that were carrying people home for the evening, they
would stop those cars and board them, and any black
(26:29):
citizens found aboard were beaten or in many cases shot
dead at point blank range. By the time the violent
mob reached the prison, it consisted of three thousand people,
which were primarily young white men. The prison was barricaded
and defended by some of the city's most respected peacekeepers,
who made it very clear that they would not yield.
(26:50):
The mob eventually moved on from its original objective and
instead headed to the black entertainment venues, found them closed
and deserted, so the splintered into smaller groups of vigilantes.
As the night were on searching out additional victims, and
as the sun came up on the the numbers of
rioters actually swelled as some who had left the night
(27:13):
before when things started to splinter apart once again joined
the violent herd, apparently after they had gone home and
gotten some rest. So over the course of the next
twelve hours, the government made a call to citizens to
form a special police force to help quell the violence
and try to restore the city to peace. Some offers
of assistance that came in had clearly missed the message.
(27:35):
They did not get that the idea was to stop violence.
They were hoping that the government was going to sanction
their desires to annihilate all of New Orleans Black community.
The night of was still marked by violence. Both beatings
and murders still happened that night, although the assembled militia
was slowly gaining control of the city, but after three
(27:58):
days of searching, at this point, Robert Charles was still
at large, and he had in fact been in one
place the entire time that these waves of mob violence
had been sweeping through New Orleans. He had sought refuge
with friends and they had granted it. But on Friday
July a tip came in from a black informer to
the Superintendent of Police. A family named Jackson was harboring
(28:23):
him at their renting home at twelve o eight Saratoga Street.
Robert Charles had known the Jackson's for several years, and
many people had seen him visit in the Saratoga Street house.
Sergeant Gabriel Portius was dispatched to check out the tip,
and Portius had actually been one of the men who
had defended the prison and kept rioters away from Pierce,
(28:44):
and he was an incredibly well respected policeman by both
black and white citizens. He was considered unusually fair in
his treatment of everyone he encountered on his job. When
Robert Charles got wind that the police were on Saratoga Street,
he hid with his rifle in a claw it. He
had a portable furnace for casting bullets, and he had
been melting down lead pipe to make his ammunition. So
(29:08):
Porteus and Corporal John f Lally once they had made
their way to the Jackson home, questions silence Jackson about
Robert Charles, and Jackson claimed to have no knowledge of
the man, but the policeman believed that he was actually
Charles's brother. There was some confusion and they placed him
under arrest, and they were walking him into the house.
(29:30):
Charles emerged from the closet where he had been hiding
and he shot both officers Porteus and Lally. Portius died
almost immediately, but Lally held on for a little while,
and there was a moment of confusion as several men
ran from their homes in the area after hearing these shots. Initially,
two policemen who had been stationed in the street attempted
(29:50):
to arrest a man, thinking that he was Charles, but
then realizing he was simply somebody who lived nearby and
had been running in fear. Yeah, once those shots rang out,
I mean again, knowing what had been happening in the city,
pretty much everyone that was near uh this house ran
into the streets, and so everyone thought that all of
(30:10):
those people were Robert Charles fleeing. But Charles had not fled.
He had in fact gone into an upstairs bedroom, and
then he actually kicked a hole in the wall that
separated that bedroom from the adjoining bedroom to give himself
a wider range of vantage points. And initially it was
believed that Charles was gone, but then when he shot
at a white man who was standing in the yard below,
(30:32):
he revealed his position and a standoff began. So we
we don't know what he was thinking or what was
motivating him. But he has to have known at this
point that there was no way out, and it appears
that desperation of that knowledge incited this mindless violence, because
(30:52):
Robert Charles then began firing at white citizens. Mayor kept
a Villa, who had turned from his traveling and relieved.
The acting mayor, William Malee, made a declaration that the
authorities would fire gatling guns into the white mob that
was forming around this house if things got out of
(31:12):
hand again. So they were trying to prevent mob violence,
but just the same, an armed mob of approximately five
thousand formed in the neighborhood surrounding Charles's hideout, and the
numbers continued to swell, with estimates placing the number when
it topped out upwards of ten thousand people. During the conflict,
Charles was shot at thousands of times. The house was
(31:35):
severely damaged, but Charles snhow survived. He had fired his
weapon and estimated fifty times in the course of an
hour and forty minutes, and he had killed two additional
people and wounded nineteen others. Eventually, desperate to flush Charles
out from the residents, police snuck into the lower floor
of the residence and set a fire using a horse
hair mattress from the home, which they soaked in kerosene.
(31:58):
The hope was that the smoke would drive him out,
and a fire patrol captain that was with them dribbled
water on the mattress so that it would produce thick,
thick clouds of smoke. This actually worked, although the spreading
fire was really what drove Charles out. As Robert Charles
attempted to exit the residence, he was shot. He fell
and was shot several more times while trying to turn over,
(32:19):
still still clutching his weapon. Hail of bullets was unleashed
on his body by several men who were in the
room he had been attempting to leave through, and when
it was clear that he was dead and the ammunition
was running out among the men that were there at
close range, his body was dragged outside the house's front entrance.
A frenzy of dragging and beating the corpse and riddling
(32:43):
it with bullets then commenced. His body was then stomped,
and though the crowd wished to burn it, the police
stopped things there. Uh What was left of his remains
was then carried away on the police wagon, but as
they made their way through the streets, the crowd continued
to bat at his body with sticks. Many people chased
the wagon through the streets all the way to the morgue.
(33:05):
The night of despite the fact that it was quickly
common knowledge that Robert Charles was dead, two other black
men were killed in the street, and a black schoolhouse
was burned to the ground. The volunteer forces that had
been called to action earlier in the weeks stayed on
duty throughout Saturday and into the morning hours on Sunday
to try to deter further violence. On Sunday, which was July,
(33:30):
the body of Robert Charles was taken as discreetly as
possible to be buried in the city's Potter's Field, which
was whole cemetery. He was buried quickly without ceremony, and
the location of his grave was kept secret to prevent
any grizzly souvenir seekers from exhuming the body and cutting
it up and taking pieces away. The five officers who
(33:51):
had been at Charles's residence when he shot and killed
two of their fellow officers were all charged with cowardice
for failing to apprehend him at that time time, they
were all found guilty and dismissed from the force. All
of them appealed their verdict but lost. Yeah, so those
men that said that they were going to search for
a phone were still found guilty of cowardice for having
(34:13):
run away. Leonard Pierce was indicted on the charge of
attempting to murder police Sergeant A. Cohen. Ten people connected
to the incident at the Saratoga Street residents were arraigned,
although one of the men that was involved hanged himself
in his cell before indictments were handed down. Testimony by
Silas Jackson's wife, Martha, indicated that while she had taken
(34:35):
in Robert Charles for fear that he would hurt her
or her family if she didn't, neither Silence nor anyone
else had actually known that they were harboring him. Eventually,
only Silas, Martha and Charles Jackson were tried. Martha and
Charles were acquitted, and the jury returned a decision of
guilty for Silence, but that was for manslaughter. The judge
(34:57):
throughout that decision, saying that his only possible guilt would
have been for aiding and abetting. By May of nine
oh one, all of the Saratoga Street residents involved in
the case had been set free. Additionally, nine white men
were indicted for first degree murder in the mob violence
after numerous witnesses testified against them. Two other men were
(35:19):
indicted on charges of unlawful assembly in connection to the riots.
The actual trials were a mess of hung juries and
confused testimony and resulted basically an abandonment of the cases.
In June one, Leonard Pierce was released on bond, and
despite many scheduled hearings, none of them ever happened due
(35:41):
to schedule conflicts on the part of A. Cohen. Yeah,
they finally kind of gave up on the case. Uh.
And in the weeks following the riots in New Orleans
in July d there were numerous acts of violence around
the country that were attributed in one way or another
to the unrest associated with the Robert Charles incidents. A
final death toll attributed to Robert Charles's actions was four
(36:04):
white police officers and three civilians. Additionally, he had seriously
wounded eight people and slightly wounded a dozen more. Dozens
of black residents who had no connection to Robert Charles
other than being of the same race had been brutalized.
Many others, both black and white, had been injured by
the mobs who ran the streets of New Orleans in
(36:26):
search of vigilante justice. After the riots, the room that
Robert Charles had shared with Leonard Pierce was invaded by
both Press and Lucky Lose, many of them hoping to
carry away souvenirs. Among his personal effects were several textbooks
and composition books. And while one reporter examined the books
and determined that Charles was working on quote improving himself intellectually,
(36:49):
the writings of Robert Charles in those composition books was lost.
They were taken by unknown persons as souvenirs, and they
have never turned up in the record again. Robert Charles
had one white friend in New Orleans who was a
clothing store salesman named him and Levy and Charles, who
Levy only have our knew is Curtis Robertson regularly purchased
(37:13):
clothing from Levy's shop, and the two really came to
know and like one another. And it's interesting to note,
and this is very counter to most accounts and testimonies
that were given after all of this violence, happened. Uh
that the characterization of Charles as a bloodthirsty monster is
(37:33):
not one that Levy holds too. He always described him
really favorably as seemingly well educated and smart and with
excellent taste in clothes, And in fact, he was one
of the people that identified the body of Robert Charles
based on the clothes that he had been wearing, and
a lot of ways this is one of history's mysteries.
While we do know what happened in the various altercations
(37:56):
between Robert Charles and the police, we don't have any
clear records of his mindset or even his demeanor and
the days that led up to that first shooting on
July twenty three. Many of the statements of acquaintances who
vilified him are believed to have been given out of
fear by people of color who were basically trying to
(38:16):
distance themselves from his story basically is a means of
self preservation. Yeah, one of the women that he and
Pierce were going to meet was apparently, by some accounts,
his girlfriend, And when she was questioned, she really told
a terrible story that he was violent and that he
was had been violent with her, But that was the
(38:40):
first time that ever came up. And so there's some
theory that she was so terrified that if she was
associated with him and he had been going to meet
her that night, that she would somehow be implicated in
these crimes. That that account is often not considered reliable. Uh,
it's as I said at the beginning, it's a strange story,
(39:02):
and it's very complicated, and it's one that deserves thought.
You know, it causes me to reflect on kind of
how how things can quickly escalate and get out of
hand and happen without thoughts. And we have talked about
other events on the show that are often described as
(39:23):
as race riots, um, and a lot of times that
term is not really indicative of what really happened because
it makes it sound like there were multiple races involved
that were equal aggressors, and overwhelmingly that is not the case.
And even in this particular case, like you did have
(39:46):
one man who was horrifyingly killing police officers and civilians,
but then in terms of the riot that broke out,
that was definitely not something in which two sides were
equal aggressors. That was a it in which one side
was seeking vigilante justice. Yeah, yeah, pretty much. All of
(40:08):
the accounts suggests that basically every black person in New
Orleans at the time was hiding they were so terrified. Uh,
and with good reason that I can't imagine how frightening
that must have been. Um, would you like to move
on to non frightening listener mail? I wouldn't leave. Okay.
As I've said recently, we are working through a huge
(40:28):
stockpile of awesome postcards because while we have been traveling,
people have been traveling and sending us fabulous notes from
the road. Uh. So I will talk about a few
of them quickly here because I know this has been
a longish episode. First, our listener Paula has sent us
a few postcards, and two of them that I really
super love. One she sent us from Root sixty six
(40:49):
in Oatman because she ate at the Olive Oatman restaurant
and that made her think of the podcast that we
did on all of Oatman. The other one I super
de duper love. It is from the U. S. Basin
Rockets side Her, which is not especially super history oriented,
but um, she went to space camp and for some
reason this card made her think of US uh and
(41:09):
Martian fashion. So it is basically like a Journey to
Mars poster that's done in postcard size and it's lovely.
Who wouldn't want to think about Martian fashion? I certainly
want to, especially after horrifying episodes. So thank you, thank you,
thank you, Paula, like, it's so cool that you share
all of this travel with us. Uh. The other one
is from our listeners, Emily and Mark, and they say,
(41:31):
greetings from San Juan Island. We had planned a camping
trip here before one of us, which is apparently Emily,
stumbled upon your pig war episode while making our way
through your backlogs. We listened again on our way to
the island and visited both the English and American camps,
which are national historic parks. The park quote celebrates how
individuals and nations can resolve disputes without resorting to violence.
(41:54):
End quote, and then she put in parentheses but just
barely thank you for the fun and appropop podcast. So
they sent us a lovely postcard from San Juan Islands. Uh.
So that was lovely. Thank you, thank you, thank you too,
Paula and Emily and Mark. I hope your travels were
all safe. If you would like to write to us.
You can do so at history podcasts at how stuff
(42:16):
works dot com. You can also find us across the
spectrum of social media as missed in History. That's at
mist in History, on Twitter, Facebook dot com, slash mist
in History, Pinterest dot com, slash mist in History, Miston
History dot tumbler dot com, and on Instagram. At mist
in History. You can visit our parents site, which is
how stuff Works. You can research almost anything you like there.
(42:37):
Just put something into the search bar and you're gonna
come up with a ton of results which would be
interesting and fascinating. You can also find us at missed
in history dot com, where we have a backlog. We
have all of our episodes and an archive formats from
when the show first began. There are also show notes
for every episode that Tracy and I have worked on together.
Uh So, we encourage you come and visit us at
misston history dot com or how stuff works dot com
(43:04):
for more illness and thousands of other topics because it
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