Empire of Sin: A Story of Sex, Jazz, Murder, and the Battle for Modern New Orleans

by Gary Krist

  The mob was, if anything, even more indiscriminate than the one of 1891. “Unable to vent its vindictiveness and bloodthirsty vengeance upon Charles,” journalist Ida B. Wells later wrote, “the mob turned its attention to other colored men who happened to get in the path of its fury.” Streetcars were stopped and overturned; black passengers were taken out and beaten or shot. “Negroes fled terror-stricken before the mob like sparrows before a picnic party,” the Times-Democrat reported. “The progress of the mob was like a torchlight procession all the way to Washington Avenue.… On every side cries of ‘Kill the Negroes,’ ‘shoot them down,’ and like expressions were freely used.”

  By nine thirty, the mob—now numbering some three thousand men and boys—had reached the new parish prison in the central business district, where Lenard Pierce was being held. But they found the doors barricaded and the building protected by a double cordon of armed policemen and sheriff’s deputies. The throngs tried to rush the doors, and there were several altercations between rioters and police—and even a few shots fired—but this time the line of blue held fast. “The angry men swayed this way and that,” the Times-Democrat reported, “and their utter impatience in getting at the Negro Pierce … seemed to drive them into a state of madness.”

  By ten P.M., the frustrated crowd had moved on from the prison, breaking into smaller groups that roamed the city in search of prey. One group crossed Canal Street and entered the new Storyville District. “The red-light district was all excitement,” a reporter for the Picayune later wrote. “Women—that is, the white women—were out on their stoops and peering over their galleries and through their windows and doors, shouting to the crowd to go on with their work, and kill Negroes for them.” Saloons, dance halls, and houses of ill fame—at least those catering to a black clientele—were by this time largely shut up tight, but the mob assailed them anyway. “Out went the lights in the honky-tonks,” the Picayune reported. “The music stopped in the dance houses, and the blacks, who were dancing, singing, and gambling, ran in the dark. Some hid under the houses … [others] sought refuge in outhouses and under cisterns.”

  At the club called Big 25 on Franklin Street, Buddy Bolden was sitting in with Big Bill Peyton’s band, playing with Peyton on accordion, “Big Eye” Louis Nelson on clarinet and bass, Jib Gibbson on guitar, and a few others. According to Nelson, a woman ran in and warned them that a mob was heading into “the District,” as Storyville had also come to be known. Nelson was tempted to leave that minute, but Peyton calmed him down. “Aah, we never had nothing like that in New Orleans yet,” Peyton said, “and it won’t happen tonight.” He told the band to just keep playing. But then they started to hear some shooting nearby, and everyone panicked. “Me, I was sitting at the inside end of the bandstand, playing bass,” Nelson later recalled. “All them boys flung themselves on me in getting away from the door and out toward the back. The bass was bust to kindling, and I sailed clear across the back of the room, so many of them hit me so hard all at once.”

  The musicians and customers climbed out a back window into the alley behind the club—only to find that it was already filling with white rioters. So they ran in the other direction. “Me and Bolden and Gibbson was together,” Nelson continued. “We thought Josie Arlington might let us through her house in Basin Street. [But] when she saw who we was, she slammed the door, locked it, and start[ed] to scream. So we cut on through the lot next door, made it over the fence and on down Basin. Not one of us had a shirt on him by then, and Bolden had left his watch hanging on the wall near the bandstand. We might have been assassinated, but we was lucky enough to get to a friend’s house. We locked ourselves in and barred the doors.”

  The rampage went on all night—in the District, the Vieux Carré, and any other neighborhoods where blacks might be found. It was clear that the rioters had one simple, ugly intent: “The supreme sentiment was to kill Negroes,” as the Picayune put it. “Every darky they met was ill-treated and shot.” And through all of this, the New Orleans Police Department arrested no one.

  By morning, three blacks had been brutally killed, with six more critically wounded. Around fifty others had received lesser injuries—including five whites, two of them shot by mistake and three others beaten or shot for merely objecting to the senseless violence. Fearing a second day of mayhem, then-mayor Paul Capdevielle, who had been out of town recovering from an illness, returned to the city. He ordered every saloon in the city closed, and called for the formation of a force of five hundred special volunteer police to quell the violence. By afternoon, he had three times that many, including hundreds of the city’s most prominent citizens. Business in New Orleans, after all, had come to a virtual halt by now, as huge numbers of workers—black and white—stayed away from their jobs; the riot was even having a negative effect on the city’s securities market. Something had to be done. “The better element of the white citizens,” according to Ida Wells, “began to realize that New Orleans in the hands of a mob would not prove a promising investment for Eastern capital, so the better element began to stir itself, not for the purpose of punishing the brutality against the Negroes who had been beaten … but for the purpose of saving the city’s credit.”

  Whatever their motivation, the citizens’ force did make progress in heading off the violence. By Thursday night, when the special police were supplemented by an influx of state militiamen, the city seemed more or less under control—but not before two more blacks had been killed and fifteen others non-fatally shot or beaten. And although a semblance of order now reigned, no one forgot the fact that Robert Charles was still at large, and there was no telling what might happen when that “bloodthirsty champion of African supremacy” was finally caught.

  IN a small room in the rear annex of 1208 Saratoga Street, just fourteen blocks from his home on Fourth, Robert Charles was waiting. He had been there—holed up in the single room that constituted the structure’s entire second story—for three days now, having come directly from the scene of the shootings early Tuesday morning. It was not, perhaps, the best place for him to find refuge. He was known in the neighborhood as a friend of the Jacksons, the family who rented most of the densely occupied duplex building from its white owner; any police investigator checking out the gunman’s friends and associates would hear about the Jacksons eventually. But Charles’s mobility was still limited by his leg wound. And as the owner of the most famous black face in the city of New Orleans, now emblazoned across the front page of every daily newspaper, he didn’t have many other options. Nor could he have had any illusions about how this adventure was likely to end. A black man who killed two white policemen in the New Orleans of 1900, no matter what the circumstances, would never be allowed to explain himself in court.

  And so Robert Charles was preparing to defend himself. He still had his Winchester rifle, and in a first-floor closet under the building’s narrow staircase he had set up a small charcoal furnace. Here he was melting bits of lead pipe to make bullets. His intent was clear: if he was to die at the hand of a mob or the New Orleans police, he was going to take as many people with him as he could.

  Charles’s vigil came to an end on Friday afternoon, when he saw a police patrol wagon pulling slowly into Saratoga Street. Superintendent Gaster had received a tip shortly before noon that day. A black informant had claimed that a family by the name of Jackson—thought to be relatives of the fugitive—was harboring him in their home. A few quiet inquiries had revealed the location of that home as 1208 Saratoga Street. And although this was only one of numerous leads Gaster had received in the days since the shootings, it was a plausible one. So he’d sent one of his best officers—Sgt. Gabriel Porteus, who had been instrumental in turning away the mob at the parish prison on Wednesday—to check it out, accompanied by three other men from the Second Precinct.

  When he saw the police wagon at about three P.M., Charles collected his weapons and retreated into the closet under the stairs on the first floor. With the closet door slightly
ajar, he had a clear view of the front door of the annex, which opened onto a courtyard separating the front and back portions of the building. Charles sat there—on the chair he had been using when making bullets—with the loaded Winchester on his lap.

  In the courtyard outside, Sergeant Porteus and one of his men, Cpl. John Lally, were now questioning the main tenant of the place, a black laborer named Silas Jackson. Without preamble, Porteus asked him where “his brother Robert Charles” was. Jackson, who had just woken from an after-work nap, replied that he did have a brother named Charles Jackson, but that “Robert Charles was no relation of his.” Porteus, hoping to intimidate the man into revealing what he knew (and Jackson almost certainly had to be aware that the fugitive was hiding in his back annex), insisted again that Charles was his brother and placed him under arrest. The sergeant then demanded that Jackson let them search the premises. Jackson could do little but agree, and he led them to the door of the annex.

  Once inside, Porteus caught sight of a water bucket standing on a little table across the room, just outside the closet where Robert Charles was hiding. Claiming to be thirsty, Porteus stepped over to the bucket and grabbed the dipper. Charles didn’t hesitate. He thrust the barrel of his rifle through the crack of the open closet door and fired a shot point-blank into Porteus’s chest. Then he turned the rifle on Lally and shot the corporal in the gut. Both officers fell to the floor with fatal wounds.

  As Silas Jackson ran in a panic from the room, Charles gathered up his supply of homemade bullets and carried them, along with the rifle and his Colt revolver, up the stairs to the second-floor room. Once there, he began to kick at the wood-and-plaster wall that separated the room from its counterpart in the other half of the duplex building. He managed to pound a large hole in the flimsy wall, which he then crawled through into the empty room next door. Now, with access to both sides of the duplex, he would be able to watch the courtyard in front of the annex and the alleyways on either side of it. Clearly he was preparing to make a last stand, and he was going to make his capture as difficult for the police as possible.

  Within minutes, scores of white neighbors and passersby were filling the street in front of the building. The other two policemen who had come with Sergeant Porteus had by now called in the shooting and were awaiting backup. But others were not so cautious. Dozens of white neighbors, apparently thinking that Charles had decamped, were soon flooding into the alleys and courtyard around the back annex. One off-duty police officer—Patrolman Peter Fenny, who lived down the block—entered the ground-floor room and saw Porteus dead and Lally sinking fast. The latter, sitting upright on the floor in a slowly expanding puddle of blood, requested a priest. Feeny ran out to the street to find one, and before long was leading a Father Fitzgerald from a nearby church through the milling crowds and into the ground-floor room.

  At this point, Robert Charles decided it was time to make his continued presence known. Scanning the crowds in the yard below, he selected a white youth standing near the fence, aimed his Winchester out the back window, and fired. The young man—nineteen-year-old Arthur Brumfield—was hit in the hip and fell to the ground amid panicked mayhem. While others scrambled to exit the closed yard, Brumfield began crawling toward a stairway leading into the front building. He looked back and apparently saw Charles in the second-story window, still aiming the rifle. “For God’s sake, don’t shoot!” he allegedly cried. But Charles fired again, this time sending a bullet into the youth’s chest that killed him instantly.

  By now, word of the discovery of Charles’s hideout was spreading through the entire city. Police from stations all over Uptown New Orleans were arriving on the scene, along with hundreds of armed white civilians drawn from their homes and workplaces. The special citizens’ police force was mustered again and quickly dispatched to the scene. Mayor Capdevielle, notified of the situation as he enjoyed a Turkish bath at the St. Charles Hotel, realized instantly the great danger the situation posed to the city. He called on the state militia to hurry to Saratoga Street with their two Gatling guns—allegedly with orders to fire into the white mob if their fury degenerated again into widespread violence against innocent blacks.

  Utter chaos now reigned in the streets around 1208 Saratoga. An estimated ten to twenty thousand people were thronging the neighborhood. Hundreds of men had climbed onto rooftops surrounding the house and were now taking potshots at the second-story windows of the back annex. Charles, moving back and forth through the hole he’d kicked in the wall, would occasionally appear at one window or another to fire back. Each time, his shot would be met by dozens of answering reports, the bullets shattering the glass panes and shredding the wooden façade of the annex. How many times Charles himself was hit would never be known, but he was taking a heavy toll on his attackers. Seven of them—police and citizens alike—were seriously wounded in these exchanges, with a dozen or more others sustaining lesser wounds. Whatever else they thought they knew about Robert Charles, they now knew for sure that he was an excellent shot.

  But the standoff was not to go on indefinitely. Capt. William King of the Julia Street fire patrol, along with a few other men—apparently acting without permission—had managed to sneak into the ground-floor room of the annex of 1208 (from which the bodies of Porteus and Lally had been removed sometime earlier). They found an old horsehair mattress in the room and carried it over to the foot of the stairway leading up to the second floor. Then, while Charles paced across the two rooms above their heads, they poured kerosene on the mattress and set it afire. King doused the flames with water, so that the fire would smolder and produce copious amounts of smoke. Then he and the other men retreated from the room.

  For five minutes, the crowds looked on expectantly as black smoke filled first one side and then the other of the two-story annex. But Charles seemed unfazed, still pacing the two rooms and firing from the windows. Finally, however, the stairway of 1208 caught fire. The heat generated by the mounting flames must have been intense, and when fire and smoke began penetrating the roof, many of the spectators wondered if Charles would be burned alive. But then the fugitive appeared at the front door of the far side of the annex, the Winchester leveled at shoulder height, his derby hat pulled low over his eyes. Taken by surprise, no one got off a shot at him as he raced across the courtyard to the front section of the building. Still aiming the rifle ahead of him, he rushed into the ground-floor room of 1210—only to find several men lying in wait inside. One of them—a medical student named Charles Noiret, a member of the special citizens’ police—was the first to react; he fired at Robert Charles just as he stepped into the room. Charles fell face-first to the floor, and was just rolling over to shoot back when Noiret and every other man in the room began emptying their firearms into Charles’s body. The gunfire didn’t stop, as dozens of other men, howling in triumph, raced toward the room and discharged their own weapons into the corpse. The orgy of shooting let up only when the last man’s last bullet thudded uselessly into the lifeless body.

  Eager to show their quarry to the crowds outside, several men lifted Charles’s corpse and carried it to the front door. They dumped it on the stoop, and then, when it was understood what had happened, a cheer ran through the crowd outside. Several men ran up to the porch and dragged the body into the street. A few fired their own weapons into the corpse; others kicked or spat at it. Then a policeman carrying a double-barreled shotgun pushed his way through the crowd. It was Corporal Trenchard, the lavishly mustached patrolman who had humiliated himself during the incident at the yellow cottage, cowering in a darkened room long after Charles had fled the scene. He had borne the brunt of much scornful criticism since then, but here he felt he could redeem himself. “Now who says I am a coward?” he crowed. Then he put the muzzle of his shotgun to Charles’s chest and fired both barrels.

  Content at first to let the mob vent its rage on the corpse, police stepped in when someone brought up a container of kerosene to burn the body. They forced the would-be arson
ists back and made room for the patrol wagon to be pulled up. Two officers lifted the body by the arms and legs and flung it roughly into the back of the wagon. The frustrated mob attempted to get at the body again, but police held them off. The patrol wagon pulled away then, Charles’s head hanging precariously over the edge of the wagon’s bed, as hundreds of screaming, rock-throwing citizens followed in its wake.

  And so the “hideous monster” had been punished, but unfortunately black New Orleans still had to endure one more night of terror before it was all over. Dissatisfied with the fact that Charles had endured so little physical retribution before he died, white New Orleanians went on another ugly rampage that night. Again the mobs ran through the streets, ostensibly looking for “accomplices” but actually attacking any black person they found on the street. Two more bystanders were killed, and the Lafon School for black children—regarded as “the best Negro schoolhouse in Louisiana”—was burned to the ground. Throughout the night, there were other threats of arson and attempted massacres of black citizens. But thanks to the intervention of the special volunteer police, the bloodshed was not nearly as bad as it had been on Wednesday night. By the time dawn broke on Saturday, the mobs’ anger was all but spent, and the city was relatively quiet.

  The weekend papers generally expressed satisfaction at the quick resolution of the Saratoga Street standoff, and relief over the end of mob violence in the city. Surprisingly, they also admitted to a certain amount of grudging respect for the bravery of the gunman who had sold his life so dearly. “Robert Charles was the boldest, most desperate and dangerous Negro ever known in Louisiana,” the Picayune wrote. Even Henry Hearsey of the States seemed impressed. “Never before was such a display of desperate courage on the part of one man witnessed,” he wrote. “[I] cannot help feeling for him a sort of admiration, prompted by his wild and ferocious courage.” But all of the papers made sure that the proper lesson was drawn from the Robert Charles affair—namely, that any future challenge to white supremacy in Louisiana would be met with the harshest retribution. The days of even moderate racial tolerance in New Orleans were officially over.