Welcome back
Ready to start Mob Rule in New Orleans: Robert Charles and His Fight to Death, the Story of His Life, Burning Human Beings Alive, Other Lynching Statistics?
Start readingRead
Recent Conversations
View allMob Rule in New Orleans: Robert Charles and His Fight to Death, the Story of His Life, Burning Human Beings Alive, Other Lynching Statistics
Wells
1900
A massacre reconstructed from the hostile press's own words.
Mob Rule in New Orleans: Robert Charles and His Fight to Death, the Story of His Life, Burning Human Beings Alive, Other Lynching Statistics
Ida B. Wells · 1900
Weeks after a New Orleans mob spent a week hunting Black residents through the streets, Wells assembled her case almost entirely from the city's own Times-Democrat and Picayune — quoting the hostile press against itself, then naming the victims the papers left unnamed. It is her last major pamphlet, written as counter-history in real time: the same reporting that branded Robert Charles a "desperado" is, read against her framing, the evidence that undoes the label.
17 chapters · 21,555 words · ~1.6 hr read
Contents
Introduction
Wells's own account of why she interrupted other work to tell this story.
The Killing and the Siege
Robert Charles's arrest, his gunfight with police, and his last stand at 1210 Saratoga Street — told in the words of the hostile New Orleans press.
The Mob Turns on the City
Ten chapters of named and unnamed New Orleanians beaten, shot, and killed by a mob that could not find Charles.
Who Was Robert Charles
Wells dismantles the press's "desperado" portrait and reconstructs Charles's life from his own letters and the people who knew him.
Beyond New Orleans
A decade of burnings nationwide, and the Chicago Tribune's own numbers on who is actually lynched, and for what.