In ‘Mob Rule in New Orleans’, Ida B. Wells-Barnett explores the varying discrepancies in the press about Robert Charles’s lynching and the violence leading up to his death in 1900.
Collecting her information from two New Orleans newspapers, Wells-Barnett recounts in graphic detail the events of that particularly violent week in 1900 in New Orleans during which a mob ‘roamed the streets day and night, searching for colored men and women, whom they beat, shot and killed at will.’ She demonstrates how the media’s characterization of Charles as a thief emerged as justification for the violence whites committed against him.
A worse massacre was avoided, as stated by the author, because of ‘the determined stand for law and order taken by these great [newspapers] and the courageous action taken by the best citizens of New Orleans, who rallied to the support of the civic authorities.’ This account serves as chilling documentation of the mindless savagery of an anger- and hate-driven mob.
Born into slavery in Mississippi in 1862, Ida B. Wells-Barnett was an African-American journalist, newspaper editor, suffragist, sociologist, feminist, leader in the Civil Rights Movement, and one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909.