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

Abstract

Rural histories often explode onto city streets. In an excellent new book, K. Stephen Prince illustrates this phenomenon for the American South at the dawn of the twentieth century. The defiance of one rural migrant, a Black Mississippian named Robert Charles, convulsed New Orleans, Louisiana, and the New South's Jim Crow racial order in the summer of 1900. On July 23, Charles defended himself against members of the New Orleans Police Department who first attacked him with nightsticks and then attempted to arrest him. Over five days, Charles killed seven white men, including four policemen. In retaliation, white mobs indiscriminately killed at least six Black men and women, injuring countless more. White law enforcement proved indifferent to or incapable of protecting Black life and property despite the deputization of 1,500 citizen policemen.But Prince doesn't stop there. In admirably accessible prose suitable for graduate and undergraduate students, he has written “a book about the nature of historical inquiry” (9). The author waded into sources believing he could “write a concise, narrative history” of the New Orleans riot (7). He emerged from research less certain, deciding instead to focus on the construction of the event's historical record and legacy, the “silencing, forgetting, and erasure” at the heart of Jim Crow's archive (9). Prince signals a notable example in the book's title. In 1938, the jazz artist Jelly Roll Morton told Alan Lomax about the existence of a song about Robert Charles. “I once knew the Robert Charles song,” Morton says, “but I found it was best for me to forget it.” His reason? “This song was squashed very easily by the [police] department . . . due to the fact that it was a trouble breeder” (1). Even after Charles's death, Prince argues, the Jim Crow state imposed a “narrative inequality” by policing the memory of Black rebellion (9).Perhaps Prince's greatest innovation is the book's structure. After an introduction in which the author reviews relevant histories of Jim Crow, the carceral state, and Black life, comes a prologue where Prince sketches the New Orleans riot in its simplest terms. Five thematic chapters follow. In chapter 1, “Setting,” Prince recreates the spatial and racial geographies of Jim Crow New Orleans. “Silence,” chapter 2, focuses on the known and unknowable life of Robert Charles, from his agricultural roots to his paid position selling Black nationalist and African emigrationist literature amid the sounds of early jazz. Chapter 3, “Riot,” explores the mob disorder of July 1900 from three vantage points: “white rioters, black New Orleanians, and the city's political and economic elite” (89). Prince considers local and national meaning-making in the aftermath of the riot in chapter 4, “Reckoning,” before closing with chapter 5, “Remembrance.” Prince ends with an eight-page epilogue that reconsiders New Orleans's twentieth-century history of urban inequality and violence as a spectral memorial to the life and death of Robert Charles.Yet how urban was Robert Charles's New Orleans, anyway? Readers of Agricultural History might take special interest in Prince's interrogation of space. In chapter 1, we learn that unimproved swampland constituted much of today's Crescent City in 1900. Charles and other poor Black migrants alternately thrived and survived in the back of the town on the marshy periphery that became more important as racial segregation limited the mobility of Black residents through the so-called Metropolis of the South. Prince argues that Black New Orleans “served as the hub of a diasporic community, a way station in a cycle of internal migration . . . a migrant community” (47). This New Orleans was less cityscape than a constantly reconstituting shelter for refugees from the plantation regime.On the other hand, New Orleans's white elite imagined a capital of the industrial South. Like progressives elsewhere, they terraformed their city to marginalize the Black working classes necessary for the creation of white wealth. They deployed a police force to draw fictional lines between white and Black space. And on the night of July 23, 1900, Robert Charles was the reminder of segregation's folly. “The audacious act of being in the city,” Prince writes, “constituted . . . an affront to white supremacy” (53). The rural could be Black, not so the urban.Ultimately Prince urges us to scrutinize such hard boundaries: known/unknown, urban/rural, remembered/forgotten. His study of Robert Charles and the social upheaval attached to his name opens new directions for American and southern historians of police power and Black rebellion. He also offers a model of careful historical analysis of biography, place, and event. Readers will find few heroes or villains in his account, and fewer injunctions. Instead, The Ballad of Robert Charles seeks to understand the manifold violence necessary to maintain white supremacy in America.