Today, July 27, 2020, makes 120 years since the valiant four-day shootout that a Black laborer named Robert Charles had with a police-led lynch mob in New Orleans. G & O recount Charles' story, which Ida B. Wells preserved, and its importance for Black freedom struggle today.
LISTEN TO THE PODCAST EPISODE HERE and read the Black Thought of the Day below.
This Lynching Victim Shot Back
This Lynching Victim Shot Back
Few people today remember the massacres of scores of Black people in New Orleans in the year 1900, but even fewer have even heard of the Black man whose bold and defiant actions those massacres were in response to. Robert Charles, a Black man who worked as a laborer, a Black man who sold newspapers to help promote the cause of Black people escaping amerikkka and returning to Afrika, a Black man who believed Black people had a right to defend ourselves against the violence of both the state and civil society, a Black man who, in the end, took up arms in resistance to police abuse and the terror of white lynch mobs. The white people in and around New Orleans would have found an excuse— any excuse— to lynch Black people and burn us out of the communities we work so hard to build. But when Robert Charles smoked 7 white people and wounded 20 more, he taught the police and the lynch mob that he was hard to kill— that, as G says, it’s gonna take some ass to get some ass— and they couldn’t stand to be taught a lesson in violence— their native tongue— by a mere Black man.
I don’t know about you, but i never learned about Robert Charles until a friend hipped me to him. He was not among the Black freedom fighters i heard about in school— an i’ve had a lot of schooling and done a lot of reading specifically in Black history and radical Black thought. Obviously, his exclusion from our history books is a deliberate attempt to police the thought of Black people who might otherwise be inspired to stand up for ourselves against structural antiblackness.
Ida B. Wells began to research and write about him within days of his death, and noted that he was viciously maligned by the newspapers.
Even legendary New Orleans jazz composer Jelly Roll Morton, also a contemporary of Robert Charles, said that a local folk song was written about Charles, but quickly silenced by New Orleans authorities, suppressing the memory of the man and punishing those who sang the song:
In the land of free speech, in the land supposedly based on the idea that “all men are created equal” and that “whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it,” — Black people are not included in “the People,” Black people have no free speech, and cannot be allowed to have even a memory of the violence it takes to fight for anything even resembling our equal rights.
It is similar to the way that, in these times, declaring that Black Lives Matter is said to be terroristic.
Oh, sure, in the brief moment, we see a few statues coming down of those who, like J. Marion Sims, experimented sadistically on Black women to found the modern field of gynecology, those who, like Christopher Columbus, slaughtered and tortured Indigenous people and trafficked little girls— we still hear the overwhelming rejoinder that these statues commemorating the oppressive and racist people who “made amerikkka great” should be remembered and allowed to be displayed prominently. Such people might say, “You can remember Robert Charles as long as i can remember Nathan Bedford Forrest.”
So for people who resisted lynching, memory might be allowed as long as the memory of the people who lynched is also preserved. Such false, moral equivalencies obscure what’s really going on. The powerful oppressors— who dot the land with memorials rationalizing their racist genocide and enslavement of people —know that statues and other memorials perform ideological labor. They make white people feel proud of those very things of which they should feel ashamed. They know that whiteness — which, again, is not a racial or genetic category but some made up BS — is enforced by genocide and slavery, and so it is imperative to tidy up the memory of genociders so that people will normalize the violence they have done and continue to do through subsequent generations. They know that these memorials do violence to Indigenous and Black people — more violence than we could ever return, for their violence shaped the realities we live in, the realities the modern world must endure. There is no equivalency between the oppressed who can barely hear the names of our freedom fighters spoken or sung about and the ones who slaughtered us who have their faces on 20 dollar bills.
It’s like Walter Rodney said: "By what standard of morality can the violence used by a slave to break his chains be considered the same as the violence of a slave master?" (Rodney, The Groundings with My Brothers, 2019, London: Verso, p. 16).
white people are not fighting for their very lives. We, Black people, are fighting for our very lives. When everywhere we walk, we see statues of our oppressors towering overhead, while on the streets below we see people who look like us forced to sleep on concrete—or being strangled to death—remembering those who fought back against the racist structure is ideological insurgency and life breath to a people who can’t breathe.
Take it from the expert. In The Wretched of the Earth, Black freedom fighter, psychiatrist, and revolutionary theorist Frantz Fanon remarked on something he observed about the attitude that oppressed people in the middle of a struggle take toward those who get branded as “criminals” when they fight back against the police.
In these coronavirus times, in these times of protests seeking justice for Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and George Floyd — among countless others — it is very important that we maintain or develop our stamina and our revolutionary capabilities, as Fanon said, by re-telling the stories that many of us are just hearing for the first time. It is part of our healing. It is good news that isn’t even new— that is only new because we never knew that we have resisted our oppression at every stage.
Today is July 27, 2020. It has been 120 years since the valiant 4-day shootout that a Black laborer named Robert Charles had with a police-led lynch mob in New Orleans in the year 1900. Ida B. Wells fought to preserve the good memories of those who knew him in her book “Mob Rule in New Orleans”:
I don’t know about you, but i never learned about Robert Charles until a friend hipped me to him. He was not among the Black freedom fighters i heard about in school— an i’ve had a lot of schooling and done a lot of reading specifically in Black history and radical Black thought. Obviously, his exclusion from our history books is a deliberate attempt to police the thought of Black people who might otherwise be inspired to stand up for ourselves against structural antiblackness.
Ida B. Wells began to research and write about him within days of his death, and noted that he was viciously maligned by the newspapers.
The press of the country has united in declaring that Robert Charles was a desperado. As usual, when dealing with a negro, he is assumed to be guilty because he is charged. … Because they failed to find any legal evidence that Charles was a lawbreaker and desperado his accusers gave full license to their imagination and distorted the facts that they had obtained, in every way possible, to prove a course of criminality, which the records absolutely refuse to show.
Charles had his first encounter with the police Monday night, in which he was shot in the street duel which was begun by the police after Officer Mora had beaten Charles three or four times over the head with his billy in an attempt to make an illegal arrest. In defending himself against the combined attack of two officers with a billy and their guns upon him, Charles shot Officer Mora and escaped.
Early Tuesday morning Charles was traced to Dryades Street by officers who were instructed to kill him on sight. There, again defending himself, he shot and killed two officers. This, of course, in the eyes of the American press, made him a desperado. (Wells, Mob Rule in New Orleans, 1900, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/14976/14976-h/14976-h.htm)
Even legendary New Orleans jazz composer Jelly Roll Morton, also a contemporary of Robert Charles, said that a local folk song was written about Charles, but quickly silenced by New Orleans authorities, suppressing the memory of the man and punishing those who sang the song:
They had a song out on Robert Charles, like many other songs and like many other, er, bad men that always had some kind of a song and somebody originated it on ‘em. But this song was squashed very easily by the department. And not only by the department, by any of the surrounding people that ever heard the song. Due to the fact that it was a trouble breeder and it never did get very far. I used to know the song, but I found it was best for me to forget it. And that I did, in order to go along with the world on the peaceful side. (Morton, "Library of Congress Narrative" http://www.doctorjazz.co.uk/locspeech1.html)
In the land of free speech, in the land supposedly based on the idea that “all men are created equal” and that “whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it,” — Black people are not included in “the People,” Black people have no free speech, and cannot be allowed to have even a memory of the violence it takes to fight for anything even resembling our equal rights.
It is similar to the way that, in these times, declaring that Black Lives Matter is said to be terroristic.
Oh, sure, in the brief moment, we see a few statues coming down of those who, like J. Marion Sims, experimented sadistically on Black women to found the modern field of gynecology, those who, like Christopher Columbus, slaughtered and tortured Indigenous people and trafficked little girls— we still hear the overwhelming rejoinder that these statues commemorating the oppressive and racist people who “made amerikkka great” should be remembered and allowed to be displayed prominently. Such people might say, “You can remember Robert Charles as long as i can remember Nathan Bedford Forrest.”
So for people who resisted lynching, memory might be allowed as long as the memory of the people who lynched is also preserved. Such false, moral equivalencies obscure what’s really going on. The powerful oppressors— who dot the land with memorials rationalizing their racist genocide and enslavement of people —know that statues and other memorials perform ideological labor. They make white people feel proud of those very things of which they should feel ashamed. They know that whiteness — which, again, is not a racial or genetic category but some made up BS — is enforced by genocide and slavery, and so it is imperative to tidy up the memory of genociders so that people will normalize the violence they have done and continue to do through subsequent generations. They know that these memorials do violence to Indigenous and Black people — more violence than we could ever return, for their violence shaped the realities we live in, the realities the modern world must endure. There is no equivalency between the oppressed who can barely hear the names of our freedom fighters spoken or sung about and the ones who slaughtered us who have their faces on 20 dollar bills.
It’s like Walter Rodney said: "By what standard of morality can the violence used by a slave to break his chains be considered the same as the violence of a slave master?" (Rodney, The Groundings with My Brothers, 2019, London: Verso, p. 16).
white people are not fighting for their very lives. We, Black people, are fighting for our very lives. When everywhere we walk, we see statues of our oppressors towering overhead, while on the streets below we see people who look like us forced to sleep on concrete—or being strangled to death—remembering those who fought back against the racist structure is ideological insurgency and life breath to a people who can’t breathe.
Take it from the expert. In The Wretched of the Earth, Black freedom fighter, psychiatrist, and revolutionary theorist Frantz Fanon remarked on something he observed about the attitude that oppressed people in the middle of a struggle take toward those who get branded as “criminals” when they fight back against the police.
In order to maintain their stamina and their revolutionary capabilities, the people also resort to retelling certain episodes in the life of the community. The outlaw, for example, who holds the countryside for days against the police, hot on his trail, or who succumbs after killing four or five police officers in single- handed combat or who commits suicide rather than "give up" his accomplices, all constitute for the people role models, action schemas, and "heroes." And there is no point, obviously, in saying that such a hero is a thief, a thug, or a degenerate. [Fanon (Richard Philcox trans.), 2004, NY: Grove, p. 30]
In these coronavirus times, in these times of protests seeking justice for Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and George Floyd — among countless others — it is very important that we maintain or develop our stamina and our revolutionary capabilities, as Fanon said, by re-telling the stories that many of us are just hearing for the first time. It is part of our healing. It is good news that isn’t even new— that is only new because we never knew that we have resisted our oppression at every stage.
Today is July 27, 2020. It has been 120 years since the valiant 4-day shootout that a Black laborer named Robert Charles had with a police-led lynch mob in New Orleans in the year 1900. Ida B. Wells fought to preserve the good memories of those who knew him in her book “Mob Rule in New Orleans”:
Men who knew him say that he was a law-abiding, quiet, industrious, peaceable man. So he lived.
So he lived and so he would have died had not he raised his hand to resent unprovoked assault and unlawful arrest that fateful Monday night. That made him an outlaw, and being a man of courage he decided to die with his face to the foe. The white people of this country may charge that he was a desperado, but to the people of his own race Robert Charles will always be regarded as the hero of New Orleans.
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