In 1900, what came to be known as the Robert Charles Riot mesmerized not only New Orleans residents but also journalists and African Americans across the nation. Late one July night, three policemen accosted Charles and his roommate, a close friend, even though the two Black men were not threatening anyone or otherwise breaching the peace. The encounter quickly escalated. A policeman brandished a billy club, Charles flashed a gun, and one policeman drew his revolver. The two men scuffled and shots were fired. The battle left Charles with a bullet wound in his leg and the policeman with gashes in his right hand. Charles escaped to his rented room under cover of night. When two policemen later found Charles, he shot and killed them both. Newspapers reported that, prior to the arrival of police, Charles had shot three more officers and escaped into the darkness. Hearing the news and reading the reports, enraged white mobs and deputies attacked Black institutions throughout the city, burning down the elite Thomy Lafon School, widely known as the best school for African Americans in Louisiana, and killing at least six more African Americans. As many as 10,000 armed men encircled the building where Charles sought refuge. For approximately two hours, the white mob peppered the structure so thoroughly it looked like a “sieve” (25). Charles fought back. At least one journalist noted his “deadly aim” and “diabolical coolness” (25). Charles ultimately killed four policemen and three other whites. After starting a fire that literally smoked Charles out of the building, the policemen and white vigilantes killed Charles and “pounced on the corpse, punching it, stomping, and shooting it where it lay” (26). The white rioters had punctured his body with more than thirty bullets. Journalists noted that his face had been “beaten into jelly” (26).

K. Stephen Prince’s The Ballad of Robert Charles: Searching for the New Orleans Riot of 1900 is a well-told and imaginative work of history that should inform the study of racial violence and the American South for years to come. Drawing upon a range of primary sources and theoretical perspectives, Prince offers a masterful and engaging narrative of the riot, its repercussions, and its remembrance. Drawing on the riot and its effects, Prince provides new insights in the historiography of Black nationalism, Black emigration, racial uplift, segregation, and public memory. In addition to writing the definitive history of the 1900 New Orleans Riot, Prince brilliantly pinpoints the ways in which a riot and its repercussions continued to shape race relations in New Orleans and the United States for more than a century.

Prince recreates the conditions that led to the riot. The Thirteenth Amendment and the rise of railroads eviscerated the twin bulwarks undergirding New Orleans’s economy—the slave trade and the shipping industries associated with cotton. The city’s police department, meanwhile, remained chronically underfunded and the local government did little to update New Orleans’ deteriorating public infrastructure. Many African Americans—and impoverished whites—were forced to live in the surrounding swamplands without access to clean water or lamp lights. White New Orleanians frequently bemoaned encounters with African Americans on sidewalks and in other public spaces throughout the city. One journalist quoted by Prince noted his discontent over “loafing, dude negroes, who are to be found there in large numbers, using profane and vulgar language, staring at people, especially ladies, and saying impudent things and using about them and acting in an insolent and boisterous manner” (53).

Coming of age during Reconstruction, Charles benefitted at times from a government that safeguarded Black rights. By 1875, however, Democrats increasingly used chicanery, violence, and suppression to successfully prevent African Americans from voting or otherwise exercising their civil rights. Anti-Black violence surged and many Black men routinely carried pistols to defend themselves. Charles worked on behalf of the Black community. He promoted the International Migration Society, which advocated for the Black emigration to Liberia and its promise of Black uplift in an independent Black nation free from anti-Black racism and racial violence. In the words of Prince, “The appeal of emigrationism was rooted in an act of radical imagination and an audacious dream of freedom” (78). Reading between the limited lines of evidence left behind by Charles, Prince ultimately concludes that “the violent betrayal of egalitarian democracy in the South explains much of his anger; the ideology of armed self-defense clarifies his preparation and his skill with a rifle; the politics of African emigrationism open up his hopes and dreams for the future; the early history of jazz reveals the contours of cultural resistance in back-of-town New Orleans … and the police jail gangs suggest the roots of Charles’s distrust of the NOPD” (86).

Over time, many white citizens and historians repressed the memories of the 1900 riot or lionized the white vigilantes and policemen who hunted down and killed Charles, destroyed Black institutions, and solidified white New Orleanian’s grip over the city. In the aftermath of the riot, African Americans faced draconian laws that segregated streetcars by race, for instance. African Americans who broke segregation laws faced a $1,000 fine or nine months in the notorious Parchment Prison, and there is evidence that policemen patrolled African American barrooms, music clubs, and neighborhoods more thoroughly and punitively.

Over the following decades, many refused to confront the historical legacy of the riot. As late as 2015, Democratic Mayor Mitch Landrieu had not acted on calls for a historical marker commemorating the riot’s victims. Black New Orleanians kept alive the memory of the riot, however. African American jazz and blues musicians portrayed Charles as a heroic Black defender and a “seemingly harmless little fellow” (183). Their songs fingered the police officers “who didn’t like coloured people” (183) as culprits. But present activism can awaken old memories. Following the rise of Black Lives Matter and widespread protests in the aftermath of the George Floyd murder in the summer of 2020, Mayor LaToya Cantrell issued a formal proclamation apologizing to the victims of the Charles Roberts Riot and unveiled a new historical marker designed to keep alive the memories of the violence for generations to come.