Robert Charles: The Man Who Fought Back

The Man Who Fought Back

In the summer of 1900, New Orleans erupted in one of the most violent race riots in American history. At its center was Robert Charles — a self-educated Black laborer from Mississippi who, for five days, held off the police and white mobs of New Orleans with a rifle and a refusal to submit.

Charles had migrated to New Orleans from Mississippi, looking for work and, like many Black Americans of his era, looking for a way out. He was an advocate for Black self-defense and emigration to Liberia, a man who had studied the racial violence of his time and concluded that survival required fighting back.

On the night of July 23, police officers confronted Charles and a companion while they sat on a porch in a white neighborhood. The confrontation escalated, shots were fired, and Charles fled. Two days later, when police came to his residence, Charles opened fire, killing a police captain and a patrolman. Over the following days, he barricaded himself in a building and held off the entire New Orleans police force, killing five law enforcement officers in total before a volunteer militiaman finally shot him on July 27.

During those five days, white mobs rampaged through Black neighborhoods across the city, attacking anyone they found. Twenty-eight people died — most of them Black residents who had nothing to do with Robert Charles. More than fifty were wounded. The violence was indiscriminate and savage.

The aftermath was devastating. Louisiana used the riots as justification for intensifying racial segregation — passing a miscegenation law in 1908 and establishing jail segregation in 1920. The message from the white power structure was clear: resistance would be punished, not just against the individual, but against the entire community.

Robert Charles is a complicated figure. He was a man pushed to violence by a system that offered him no other option. Jelly Roll Morton later recounted the terror of the riots in his 1938 Library of Congress recordings — the sound of mobs in the streets, the fear that gripped the Black community. It's a chapter of New Orleans history that the city has spent a long time not talking about. Understanding it is essential to understanding everything that came after.