Mob Rule in New Orleans: Robert Charles and His Fight to Death, the Story of His Life, Burning Human Beings Alive, Other Lynching Statistics

Glossary

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"Desperado" — the Press Label: The term the New Orleans press applied to Robert Charles from the earliest reports of the shootings and never abandoned, despite what Wells shows was its own reporters' failure to produce a single indictment, prior arrest, or documented act of violence in his history. She devotes a full chapter to demonstrating that the word functioned as a substitute for evidence — license to treat Charles's act of self-defense against an unlawful arrest as proof of an inherently criminal character.; Related: Robert Charles, The International Migration Society

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Baptiste Philo: A seventy-five-year-old Black man employed for years carrying baskets at the French Market, attacked and shot by a roving mob while walking to work in the predawn hours of the New Orleans uprising. Wells includes his case — reported under slightly different spellings of his name by the two papers she draws on — as an example of the mob's violence falling on the community's most defenseless members; his assailant, on realizing Philo's age, offered only the remark that he was "sorry I shot him."
Bishop Henry McNeal Turner and the Voice of Missions: The African Methodist Episcopal bishop and prominent emigrationist whose newspaper, the Voice of Missions, Robert Charles distributed as a local agent, collecting subscriptions and preaching its message of Black self-determination and Liberian resettlement. New Orleans papers cited Charles's connection to Turner, whom Wells describes as widely respected for learning and integrity, as further evidence of dangerous radicalism, illustrating how any assertion of Black political thought could be recast by a hostile press as proof of criminality.; Related: The International Migration Society
Burning Human Beings Alive: The chapter in which Wells catalogs fifteen documented cases of Black Americans burned to death by mobs between 1891 and 1899 — including Ed Coy, Henry Smith, C.J. Miller, Lee Walker, and Sam Hose — establishing that public torture-killing had become a recurring practice witnessed, in her account, by crowds ranging from two thousand to fifteen thousand people, some of whom collected the victims' remains as souvenirs. She places the New Orleans killings within this broader national pattern rather than treating them as an isolated Louisiana atrocity.; Related: The Chicago Tribune Lynching Table

D

D.J. Flummer's Letter: A testimonial letter from D.J. Flummer, president of the International Migration Society, written at Wells's request after Robert Charles's death, describing him across five or six years of business dealings as mild, earnest, law-abiding, and motivated by "love of humanity" rather than any hostility. Wells reprints the letter alongside Charles's own final note to the society — mailed days before the shootings, requesting more pamphlets to distribute — as first-hand evidence directly contradicting the press's portrait of a man whose whole existence pointed toward violence.; Related: The International Migration Society

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Hannah Mabry: An elderly Black woman shot through the lung by a mob that fired into her Rousseau Street cottage after midnight while she slept beside her sixty-two-year-old husband, David. Wells includes the attack — reported by the same paper that covered the manhunt for Robert Charles — to show that the violence he provoked was, within days, being visited on Black residents who had no connection to him at all, in their own homes.

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Louis Taylor: A thirty-year-old Black vegetable carrier shot and beaten near the French Market by a mob who spotted him at a soda stand and opened fire as he fled; he survived long enough to reach Charity Hospital, where the attending physicians pronounced his wounds mortal. Wells quotes the mob's own boasting account of the killing, given to a reporter minutes afterward, as evidence of how little concealment the violence required — men described shooting Taylor and an earlier, unidentified victim in the same breath as an evening's entertainment.

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Robert Charles: The Black laborer and emigration-society organizer at the center of the New Orleans uprising Wells documents, who killed police officers in self-defense after two unprovoked, unlawful arrest attempts and held off a mob of thousands for nearly three hours before being burned out of his hiding place and killed on July 27, 1900. Wells's central argument, developed across the pamphlet's second half, is that the New Orleans press's portrayal of Charles as a "desperado" collapses under its own reporting, which found no criminal record, no evidence of violence before the police assaults, and a life devoted to underpaid labor and Liberian-emigration advocacy.; Related: "Desperado" — the Press Label, The Siege on Saratoga Street, The Dryades Street Incident

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Survivor Testimonies: First-person accounts Wells collects from Black New Orleanians treated at Charity Hospital after being beaten or shot by the mob for no offense beyond being visible on the street — among them Alex Ruffin, a Pullman porter shot while riding a streetcar, and Esther Fields, a washerwoman beaten unconscious after stepping outside to see what the noise was. Wells reproduces their own words, rather than the newspapers' framing, to let the mob's ordinary victims — as distinct from Charles himself — describe what happened to them in their own voices.

T

The $250 Reward: Mayor Paul Capdevielle's public proclamation offering $250 for Robert Charles's body "dead or alive" after Charles killed two more officers, Captain Day and Patrolman Lamb, in a second confrontation on July 24, 1900. Wells presents the notice as official license for summary killing — a city government explicitly authorizing what amounted to a bounty on an unconvicted man — and treats it as the moment New Orleans's mob violence against the wider Black community was implicitly sanctioned from the top down.; Related: Robert Charles
The Chicago Tribune Lynching Table: The year-by-year lynching count for 1882 through 1899, compiled by the Chicago Tribune and reprinted as the pamphlet's closing chapter, showing between roughly 39 and 241 Black Americans killed annually with a clear escalation through the early 1890s and a slow decline by the decade's end. Wells uses the accompanying breakdown of charges — showing rape accusations accounted for well under a third of lynchings in most years — as her final, cumulative rebuttal to the claim that mob violence existed to protect white women.; Related: Burning Human Beings Alive
The Dryades Street Incident: The July 23, 1900 encounter in which three New Orleans policemen — Sergeant Aucoin and Officers Mora and Cantrelle — approached Robert Charles and Leonard Pierce as the two men sat talking on a doorstep and attempted to arrest them without a warrant or any accusation of a crime. When Officer Mora struck Charles with his club and drew a gun, Charles returned fire, wounding Mora, and fled; Wells reproduces both major New Orleans dailies' conflicting accounts side by side to show that neither could actually place the first shot with the police, though both insisted on it.; Related: Robert Charles
The Gretna Manhunt: A night of chases and near-lynchings across the river from New Orleans in the town of Gretna, where armed residents pursued multiple Black men on the unfounded belief that Robert Charles's likeness had been spotted among them, firing on a moving train and detaining a man named Luke Wallace who bore no resemblance to Charles. Wells reprints the Picayune's own framing of the night as recreational — "Gretna's male population had its little fan" — to show how casually the press treated armed terror against Black residents once separated from any specific accusation.
The International Migration Society: A Birmingham, Alabama-based organization, led by D.J. Flummer, that promoted Black emigration to Liberia and distributed pamphlets for which Robert Charles served as an unpaid local agent. New Orleans reporters searching Charles's room treated the group's literature — pages Wells notes contained no incendiary language and could be "preached from every pulpit in the land" — as proof of a dangerous, race-hating mind, an inference Wells dismantles by quoting the pamphlets and Flummer's own testimonial letter about Charles's character in full.; Related: "Desperado" — the Press Label, Bishop Henry McNeal Turner and the Voice of Missions
The Siege on Saratoga Street: The July 27, 1900 final confrontation in which police cornered Robert Charles in a house at 1210 Saratoga Street; Charles killed two more officers who searched the building, then held off a crowd Wells's sources estimate at twenty thousand for nearly three hours, wounding or killing several more before the mob set the house on fire to force him out. He was shot to death in the doorway, and his body was then dragged through the streets and mutilated by the crowd. Wells reprints the Times-Democrat's own account in full, arguing that even a hostile paper's description of Charles's composure under fire undercuts its own characterization of him as a mindless "fiend."; Related: Robert Charles
The Times-Democrat and Picayune as Sources: The two leading New Orleans daily newspapers whose reporting Wells relies on throughout Mob Rule in New Orleans, stating in her introduction that she uses their accounts "freely" because their detailed, minute coverage of the week's violence — despite editorial positions condemning the mob — carried a credibility with skeptical white readers that a Black investigator's own testimony alone could not match. The strategy mirrors her practice in earlier pamphlets of citing white-authored statistics and reporting against the case those same sources meant to make.