If ” I wish a cussword would,” had a face, then that would be the face of Robert Charles. Robert Charles died in a hail of bullets and that’s the way he wanted it…
(Pictured above, is Holt Cemetary in New Orleans, where Robert Charles is buried.)
It happened between July 23 and July 28, 1900, in New Orleans, Louisiana. Now Louisiana, the “By Gawd Boy,” state signed the Ordinance of Secession on January 26, 1861, and was the sixth state to try and leave the Union. Of course, we know how that turned out… our Union boys whopped it really good and made them cry on April 9, 1865. That was the day General Robert E. “I Swear to Gawd, I Won’t Do It Again,” Lee, surrendered to Ulysses S. “Swear On Yo’ Mama…” Grant, at Appomattox Court House in Appomattox, Virginia. Now, although Lee surrendered to Grant on this day, it was not the official end of the Civil War. As a matter of fact, the official end of the war didn’t occur until after President Lincoln’s death on April 15, 1865. It wasn’t until August 20, 1866, over a year later that President Johnson announced the end of the American Civil War:
“And I do further proclaim that the said insurrection is at an end and that peace, order, tranquility and civil authority exists in and throughout the whole of the United States.”
President Andrew Johnson (1866)
He also named all the states that had been in rebellion in his address… except for Texas. Our boys had to whip it a little bit more in Texas before they gave it up. Anywho, before the war, Louisiana had more than 22,000 slaveholders. It was second in per-capita wealth in the nation owing to it’s large sugar and cotton plantations. Mississippi was first. So, with 22,000 “Massa’s” in Louisiana having their every desire and wish fulfilled by over 124,000 enslaved black people for over 300 years, it was a hard pill to swallow having to fend for yourself after the civil war or what some people refer to as the “Great Azz Whooping.” Okay… I’m the only one that refers to it like that… Anyway, this brings us to the Robert Charles affair, which happened a scant 34 years after the Great Azz Whooping.
THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW OF DEATH
So, Robert Charles was originally from Mississippi. According to my references he was a self-educated man and an activist. He believed in self-defense for the black community and advocated going back to Africa. As an aside, it would have been a hard sell for me. By the 1900’s over twenty generations of African descendants had passed since being enslaved in America. Culturally, we were no more African than whites. I guess that’s why many didn’t leave. Anyway, on July 23, 1900, Robert Charles and Leonard Pierce were sitting on a porch in a predominately white section of New Orleans. Now I would like to say it was their porch they were sitting on, but it wasn’t. Then again, they might not have even been sitting on someone else’s porch. I mean why would you go and sit on a white man’s porch, who you don’t know in New Orleans in 1900, unless you had a death wish and wanted to be hung from the tallest tree they could find?
Wife: Earl there’s a couple of nigra’s sitting on our front porch drinking 40’s…
Husband: NIGRA ARE YOU CRAZY!!!! DONT CHA KNOW I WILL HANG Y’ALL FROM THE TALLEST TREE I CAN FIND!!!!
That wouldn’t even fly in our day. Anyway, I’m just gonna report the story as it has been reported in history.
So, they were hanging out on “somebody’s porch,” when the police were called about two suspicious black men. Sergeant Jules C. Aucion, Joseph D. Cantrelle, and August T. Mora approached the men.
Sergeant: Nigra… are you crazy? What are you doing here and how long have you been here?
Leonard: We are waiting for a friend…”
Sergeant: WHAT!!??
It was at this time that Charles stood up. One of the officers, Mora, took this as a sign of aggression and grabbed him… they struggled a bit before Mora made the mistake of taking out his Billy club. Whap!! Whap!! Mora hit Charles across the dome with it. Charles pulled out Mr. Ugly… Bam!! Bam!! Mora fired back… Bam!! Bam!! Both men were hit. Charles fled… Leonard couldn’t do anything because after Charles and Mora begin throwing hands, one of the other officers had pulled it out and placed cold steel up against the temple… “Give me a reason nigra…” So, although Charles had fled, he didn’t go to his house until the wee hours of the next morning. This is when it hit the fan. At about 3:AM a police officer named Captain Day and a patrol wagon full of other policemen rode up to Charles’s residence.
Captain: Come on out nigra… or we gonna come up in there and drag yo’ ass out!! Okay … you had yo’ chance… let’s go Peter!! As they approached, Charles pulled out his .38-caliber Winchester rifle and shot the captain through the heart. He then shot his boy, Officer Peter Lamb in the dome, killing both men.
AWWW NIGRA!!!! ITS AIN’T GONNA BE NOTHING LESS THAN THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW OF DEATH!!!
The rest of the officers who were with the captain took cover. In the confusion, Charles got away. After seeing that Charles had escaped, a manhunt was organized.
On the morning of the 24th, men gathered outside of Charles’s house where the policemen had been killed demanding an “official lynching!!” That’s saying something! I think I covered “official lynchings in another article sometime back. I’ll have to look for it. In the meantime, an official lynching only occurred when a white woman’s honor was defiled, or more than one white man was killed. It was usually posted in the newspaper and people often held picnics before the condemned was trotted out and hung before hundreds of onlookers…
Apologize….
THE REBEL EXPRESS
April 19, 1900
by Clyde D. Whiteman.
This Sunday, there will be an official lynching from the tallest tree they can find in front of the Court House at 12 noon. Nigra Jim has been pronounced guilty in a court of law by members of our peers for the murder of Boss Bob. On Tuesday last, Boss Bob in his official capacity as a gawd fearing white man, ordered Nigra Jim to apologize. It was within Boss Bob’s rights to ask Nigra Jim to apologize without giving him a reason. When Nigra Jim refused to apologize, Boss Bob smacked him across the lips with his gloves. Because we don’t want to offend the sensibilities of our readers, what happened next will not be printed out of respect for the deceased, but we can advise you that his head was recovered and reattached. Funeral services for Boss Bob will be held after the lynching at the Confederate Chapel in K-Town.
A Couple Of Good Ones
So yeah… that is what an official lynching looked like. Anyway, they gathered at Charles’s house and called for a lynching, however they dispersed when they were told that Charles had been captured and was now in jail. That was a lie. This was one day after the encounter… on the 24th. On the 25th of July a reward of $250 was put out for the capture of Robert Charles by the acting mayor. The actual mayor was out of town. The acting mayor asked everyone to remain calm, as they now knew that Charles was not in custody. However, the Times-Democrat, a New Orleans paper, put the blame for the deaths of the two police officers on the black community. The newspapers fanning hate between blacks and whites was nothing new. Despite having some racist on their staffs, the real reason for keeping shat up between blacks and whites is that it sold newspapers. These people lived boring lives. An occasional burning or lynching of a black man was their highlight of the month… and the newspapers made that happen.
In the days that followed, gangs of white racist roamed the streets attacking any black person they met. On the night of the 25th, they killed three black folks and wounded six more critically. Over 50 were wounded but didn’t require care. History also says that five whites were injured and required hospitalization. Now we are throwing around words like wounded… but for real, for real, these folks were throwing lead… it was straight up “Gun Smoke” in that joint. Gun Smoke was a TV western I used to watch when I was a kid… Marshall Matt Dillion in Dodge City…Bang !! Bang!! Bang!!… shooting everything that had a black hat on… anywho, so yeah, black folks were fighting back too.
In the meantime, everybody was still looking for Charles’s whereabouts. Well Charles was right under their noses. He was hiding in a house not too far from his own, where he remained hidden from the police until Friday, July 27.
So, I would like to tell you they found him by searching everybody’s house, but no… he was ratted out by another black man… probably for that $250. Now don’t get me wrong. If a black man is in your neighborhood terrorizing people, killing children, selling dope or shooting police, turn their azz “IN!!” That’s some foul stuff to me. In this case, what we have here is a nigra, turning in a black man. They are not the same. Anyway, as the police went inside Charles’s new hiding place, he opened fire again, killing two more officers. The other officers heard the gunshots and descended on the house, bringing reinforcements. Now, since I’m talking about black history, I need to bring this point up too. I ain’t gonna pick and choose which part of the story to tell like some people we know in Florida.
When they were hunting for Charles, they brought in reinforcements to 1), surround the house Charles was in… and 2), to protect the other black citizens in the neighborhood from the white mob that was gathering. As a matter of fact, the mayor fearing that some large-scale bloodbath of the black population might take place, called the state militia to go to the scene… and he made a special point of this… take your two Gatling guns with you and if things got completely out of control, the Gatling guns should be fired into the white mob. His name was Capdevielle… Mayor Capdevielle.
Ida B Wells
Anyway, let’s get back to Robert Charles aka “The Face.” So, before we started talking about Capdevielle, we said that Charles had shot two other officers who had come for him. Throughout the day Charles and the police exchanged fired. By the time it had ended Charles had shot and mortally wounded 5 police officers and wounded 19 other people shooting at him. It ended when some men snuck into the house and lighted a mattress under the floor where Charles was. The smoke forced him out and … AWWWW NIGRA!! They shot him until everybody had run out of bullets… then they beat the body with pipes and sticks as they dragged it down the street.
So after killing Charles, the white mob wasn’t satisfied. They wanted revenge for the 23 people he had killed or shot. Several other black folks were killed in the aftermath and an historic black school was burned to the ground. By the morning after Charles had been killed, order had been restored in the city by the state militia. As for the snitch, well his name was Fred Clark, he was murdered by a man named Lewis Forstall for tipping off the police to Charles’s whereabouts. It isn’t known what happened to Forstall for the murder of Clark, unless you believe the story about his descendants receiving flowers from anonymous well-wishers every July… okay I’m kidding. Anyway, the Charles story received national attention and whites intensified and increased the reach of racial segregation in the state. In 1908 the state legislature passed a miscegenation law, prohibiting interracial marriage or domestic partnerships. In 1920, New Orleans established racial segregation in jails and the Catholic Church established a segregated parish in downtown New Orleans.
The famous journalist and black activist Ida B. Wells commented about Robert Charles in her study on lynchings in the South, saying…
“Charles would have died had not he raised his hand to resent an 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.'”
Well, that’s the story of Robert Charles. I hope you enjoyed reading this week’s article.
Please join us again next week for more black history on Hill1News.
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