15. The whole city was at the mercy of the mob
Ida B. Wells-Barnett, "Mob Rule in New Orleans" (1900)
Last week: Zitkála-Šá, "Impressions of an Indian Childhood" (1900)
This week: Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Mob Rule in New Orleans (1900)
Next week: “Girl” by Jamaica Kincaid (1978)
This is part two of a lecture I’ve provisionally entitled “twenty-year-old women journalists who reported out on the weight and violence of white supremacy in their communities in 1900.” Zitkála-Šá and Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1862-1931) were voices from transitional generations — Zitkála-Šá was born at the end of the wars for Native sovereignty against the federal government, and Ida B. Wells-Barnett was a member of the emancipation generation. Part of the power of their writing is the immediacy with which they confronted a turbulent and dangerous time to be a woman of color in America.
Wells was living in Memphis in 1884, raising her siblings after the death of her parents, herself just 22 years old when a train conductor tried to forcibly move her from the “ladies car” to the “colored car.” She resisted, and was beset by two other men who pulled her from the car, to the applause of the white passengers. Her anger motivated her to sue the railroad (unsuccessfully) and to write a weekly column about this and other injustices of segregation in the newspapers (successfully). Soon she had a weekly column, a pamphlet series, and a partnership share in a newspaper, the Free Speech and Headlight.
When lynching took the lives of three of her friends in 1892, she organized a boycott of white-owned businesses, who threaten her life as well. Wells moved to Chicago and began publishing nationally distributed pamphlets about lynching: first the groundbreaking Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in all its Phases and then a followup with detailed quantitative data in A Red Record. Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynchings in the United States, 1892-1893-1894.
The statistics in these documents showed that white violence had killed more than 10,000 black people in the years after the Civil War. Anti-black violence was on the rise, and Wells used white-owned newspaper articles and public records to center the brutal truth of widespread lynching hidden in these pages.
Mob violence and the media go hand in hand. Her writing takes the media coverage of anti-Black violence and turns it against itself. By citing and extracting large chunks of other journalists’ writing, she proves how the blasé way that lynching and racial violence were covered in white newspapers, and how the frequency of the occurrence of these mobs, had the overall effect of naturalizing a shocking event. While her topic had a life or death urgency to it — and though her own life was threatened by it — she took a cool and investigative approach to white hate.
“Mob Rule in New Orleans: Robert Charles and his Fight to Death, the Story of his Life, Burning Human Beings Alive, other Lynching Statistics” published in 1900, is an excellent example of this strategy. In July of 1900, three policemen decided, without cause or warrant, to arrest two Black men, Robert Charles and Leonard Pierce, as they sat chatting on a stoop at Dryades, between Washington Avenue and 6th Street, a couple of blocks from their respective homes. They were hanging in the neighborhood on a hot Monday evening.
Leonard Pierce was taken into custody with a gun to his head. Officer Mora beat Robert Charles with a billy club, and he tried to run. When the officer pulled his weapon, Charles did too. Two shots rang out, and Charles ran away, wounded. Mora was taken to the hospital, where he died soon afterwards.
Side note: when I googled the block to get my bearings (it’s a block from Verret’s Lounge) a news item popped up, reporting that in 2020, a man was shot there at that same place at 4:30 in the afternoon.
Wells-Barnett writes that her purpose is:
to tell the story of the mob in New Orleans, which, despising all law, roamed the streets day and night, searching for colored men and women, whom they beat, shot and killed at will.
In the account of the New Orleans mob I have used freely the graphic reports of the New Orleans Times-Democrat and the New Orleans Picayune. Both papers gave the most minute details of the week's disorder. In their editorial comment they were at all times most urgent in their defense of law and in the strongest terms they condemned the infamous work of the mob.
These citations from the local newspapers serve two purposes: to critique and decry the violence they report and to critique the reporting itself. For example:
In any law-abiding community Charles would have been justified in delivering himself up immediately to the properly constituted authorities and asking a trial by a jury of his peers. He could have been certain that in resisting an unwarranted arrest he had a right to defend his life, even to the point of taking one in that defense, but Charles knew that his arrest in New Orleans, even for defending his life, meant nothing short of a long term in the penitentiary, and still more probable death by lynching at the hands of a cowardly mob. He very bravely determined to protect his life as long as he had breath in his body and strength to draw a hair trigger on his would-be murderers. How well he was justified in that belief is well shown by the newspaper accounts which were given of this transaction. Without a single line of evidence to justify the assertion, the New Orleans daily papers at once declared that both Pierce and Charles were desperadoes, that they were contemplating a burglary and that they began the assault upon the policemen. It is interesting to note how the two leading papers of New Orleans, the Picayune and the Times-Democrat, exert themselves to justify the policemen in the absolutely unprovoked attack upon the two colored men.
Then follows several pages of text from these papers, set aside in comparison to Wells-Barnett’s explanations and editorializing. The effect is not unlike watching Jon Stewart, or John Oliver, or Trevor Noah take on Fox News. These soundbites from the New Orleans papers are damning — not least of all the reward that they posted on behalf of the city, offering $250 for the body of Robert Charles, dead or alive.
He was located Tuesday in the early hours of the morning, in a standoff which resulted in more shots fired and three officers killed, before Charles was taken into custody at 5 am. He was beaten by the mob on the way there, those that could get into the wagon cart with him, and then the police allowed him to be destroyed by a mob of 200 men outside the Sixth Precinct.
Wednesday New Orleans was in the hands of a mob. Charles, still sought for and still defending himself, had killed four policemen, and everybody knew that he intended to die fighting. Unable to vent its vindictiveness and bloodthirsty vengeance upon Charles, the mob turned its attention to other colored men who happened to get in the path of its fury. Even colored women, as has happened many times before, were assaulted and beaten and killed by the brutal hoodlums who thronged the streets. The reign of absolute lawlessness began about 8 o'clock Wednesday night. The mob gathered near the Lee statue and was soon making its way to the place where the officers had been shot by Charles.
The mob stopped a streetcar that had one Black passenger on it by physically taking the car off the tracks. The mob chased and brutally murdered him.
The mob came to the French Market and shot a 75-year-old man Baptiste Philo, as he set up his stall. Then then shot another man who drove a supply wagon. And then another as he set up the vegetable stall.
The mob broke into a cottage on on Rousseau Street and wrecked their home. The mob shot a woman at midnight while she was sleeping at her home. The mob shot a man as he sat on his porch. The mob shot a boy as he ran into his house.
And many more.
By 2pm on Thursday, the violence had reached a terrifying pitch. About 1000 white citizens showed up to be volunteer police, and to help quell the crowd. These people were shown by Wells-Barnett to be complicated allies — they looked to protect property and their city’s reputation, and perhaps were not there to protect Black lives.
I encourage you to click through and read the report, especially if you love New Orleans, and might recognize the place names. These were a terrifying few days in our history, and there’s no plaque or class plan that commemorates it.
With the last chapter of the report, Ida B Wells-Barnett takes back the narrative from the newspapers and tells us that she is interested in portraying Robert Charles as a hero, despite the media’s attempts to make him into a “fiend” or “desperado”:
The darkest pictures which the reporters could paint of Charles were quoted freely, so that the public might find upon what grounds the press declared him to be a lawbreaker. Unquestionably the grounds are wholly insufficient. Not a line of evidence has been presented to prove that Charles was the fiend which the first reports of the New Orleans charge him to be.
She demonstrates that he was trying to educate himself, and that he was a proponent of emigration to Liberia. She shows that his reputation should be considered that of a hero, who died in self defense.
So he lived and so he would have died had not he raised his hand to resent unprovoked assault and unlawful arrest that fateful Monday night. That made him an outlaw, and being a man of courage he decided to die with his face to the foe. The white people of this country may charge that he was a desperado, but to the people of his own race Robert Charles will always be regarded as the hero of New Orleans.