To poison a nation The murder of Robert Charles and the rise of Jim Crow policing in America

Bates College historian Baker debuts with a meticulous account of the confrontation between a Black laborer and white police officers that sparked violent racial unrest in 1900 New Orleans. A transplant from rural Mississippi, Robert Charles was sitting on a stoop in a mixed-race working-class neighborhood when three patrolmen demanded to know what he was doing there. In the ensuing confrontation, Charles shot one of the policemen before fleeing to his apartment, where he killed two others in an ambush. Over the next several days, during the largest manhunt in the city's history, white mobs attacked Black residents indiscriminately, killing at least seven people before Charles was found and killed in a shoot-out. Baker documents how white business leaders and political power brokers sought to crush tenuous alliances between Black and white laborers who wanted better working conditions, and portrays the city's police department as the enforcer of strict codes of white supremacy that aimed to keep one of the country's largest Black populations in its place. Baker provides copious details about the labor and political issues involved, but short-changes the depictions of Black daily life in New Orleans, and an epilogue catching the story up to the present day feels rushed. Still, this is an eye-opening excavation of a little-known American tragedy. (June)

Rousted by three white policemen while sitting with a friend on a New Orleans doorstep on July 23, 1900, Robert Charles resisted. Baker (history, Bates Coll.) details how Charles, a 35-year-old Mississippi-born Black man, arrived at that moment--and how New Orleans arrived at that moment. The author casts the July 23 event as pivotal; it certainly turned deadly. Charles was bludgeoned and shot by the police officers; he in turn shot and killed two of the men and then escaped. This set off a manhunt and eventually the three-day Robert Charles riots, in which white people rampaged through Black New Orleans neighborhoods and killed a number of Black bystanders. In a gun battle, a cornered Charles killed seven people and wounded at least 20 more; eventually he was forced out of his hiding place and gunned down before mobs mutilated his body. Baker effectively describes the developing and subsequent emotive environment of race relations in New Orleans, amid urban machine politics and labor strife. The author weaves in connections to 21st-century policing and white supremacist violence; these extend and add interpretive analysis to earlier accounts of the tragedy, including Ida B. Wells-Barnett's noteworthy 1900 report and historian William Ivy Hair's 1976 Carnival of Fury. VERDICT This straightforward recounting of a notable, sometimes forgotten moment in American history deserves attention; the riots' lingering effects are still felt in the 21st century.--Thomas J. Davis, Arizona State Univ., Tempe

An account of racial violence in 1900 New Orleans reveals a complex system of institutional racism. Bates College history professor Baker tells the multilayered story of Robert Charles, who shot a White police officer and later died in a shootout with police. The book is a nuanced history of a Black man unable to improve his status in a racist world who was ultimately no longer willing to cower to White hostility. Charles, writes the author, was "conceived in slavery," the son of sharecroppers with little education. After an altercation while working as a railroad laborer in Mississippi, he fled and joined the wave of laborers who left rural areas for the big city, New Orleans. Escaping not just poverty, but also the horrendous violence of Reconstruction-era Mississippi, where White terrorism was common, Charles "reached a city on the edge, suspended between a tumultuous and disappointing history and dreams of a remarkable future." The populous former slave-market hub was a commercial capital, and the corrupt local government often caved to business concerns. All the while, racial tensions simmered. "Emancipation was a red-hot torch in the social powder keg," writes Baker, "as struggles over the meaning of black freedom made New Orleans the most dangerous city in postwar America." Violence erupted in July 1900, when Charles--then involved in the International Migration Society, which helped Blacks relocate to Liberia--resisted police interrogation as he waited outside a girlfriend's apartment building with his friend. Riots shook the city for days, killing at least 28 people and culminating in Charles' lynching, an event that served as a launching pad for the police force to reinforce and extend its extreme measures against Black citizens. In an intricate narrative, Baker also traces into the 20th century other examples of police brutality and vigilantism in the city. A sturdy addition to the literature on the early period of the Jim Crow era. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.