ABSTRACT
During the late hours of July 23, 1900, an altercation between three white police officers and a well-dressed but armed black man named Robert Charles took place in New Orleans. Charles shot at these officers, and more of their colleagues a few hours later. By dawn on July 24, he had killed two police officers, including the local precinct captain, and wounded at least one other. He evaded capture for four days as mobs of “Negro hating” whites repeatedly sought violent and bloody revenge, killing at least six African Americans and wounding seventy. Tipped off as to Charles’s whereabouts on July 27, police officers, state militia, and thousands of mainly white armed citizens and onlookers quickly surrounded the building. With his back against the wall and no possibility of survival, Charles continued to fire from the besieged building in an “intentionally symbolic act of violent resistance,” shooting twenty-four people before he was killed. 1
