Mob Rule in New Orleans: Robert Charles and His Fight to Death, the Story of His Life, Burning Human Beings Alive, Other Lynching StatisticsWells-Barnett, Ida B.
History
Mob Rule in New Orleans: Robert Charles and His Fight to Death, the Story of His Life, Burning Human Beings Alive, Other Lynching Statistics
Wells-Barnett, Ida B.
Lynching
When Charles first came to New Orleans he worked here and there as a day
laborer. He was employed at different times in a sawmill, on the street
gangs, as a roustabout on the levee, as a helper at the sugar works and
as a coal shoveler in the engine room of the St. Charles Hotel. At each
of the places where he worked he was known as a quiet, rather surly
fellow, who had little to say to anybody, and generally performed his
tasks in morose silence. He managed to convey the impression, however,
of being a man of more than ordinary intelligence.
A Negro named William Butts, who drives a team on the levee and lives on
Washington Street, near Baronne, told a _Times-Democrat_ reporter
yesterday that Charles got a job about a year ago as agent for a
Liberian Immigration Society, which has headquarters at Birmingham, and
was much elated at the prospect of making a living without hard labor.
According to the further investigations of this reporter, Charles was also
agent for Bishop Turner's _Voice of Missions_, the colored missionary
organ of the African Methodist Church, edited by H.M. Turner, of Atlanta,
Georgia. Concerning his service as agent for the _Voice of Missions_, the
reporter says:
He secured a number of subscribers and visited them once a month to
collect the installments. In order to insure regular payments it was
necessary to keep up enthusiasm, which was prone to wane, and Charles
consequently became an active and continual preacher of the propaganda
of hatred. Whatever may have been his private sentiments at the outset,
this constant harping on one string must eventually have had a powerful
effect upon his own mind.
Exactly how he received his remuneration is uncertain, but he told
several of his friends that he got a "big commission." Incidentally he
solicited subscribers for a Negro paper called the _Voice of the
Missions_, and when he struck a Negro who did not want to go to Africa
himself, he begged contributions for the "good of the cause."
In the course of time Charles developed into a fanatic on the subject of
the Negro oppression and neglected business to indulge in wild tirades
whenever he could find a listener. He became more anxious to make
converts than to obtain subscribers, and the more conservative darkies
began to get afraid of him. Meanwhile he got into touch with certain
agitators in the North and made himself a distributing agent for their
literature, a great deal of which he gave away. Making money was a
secondary consideration to "the cause."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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