Note (return) — Chapter XV

One night in July, an hour before midnight, two Negroes Robert Charles and Leonard Pierce, who had recently come into the city from Mississippi and whose movements had interested the police, were found by three officers on the front steps of a house in Dryades Street. Being questioned they replied that they had been in the town two or three days and had secured work. In the course of the questioning the larger of the Negroes, Charles, rose to his feet; he was seized by one of the officers, Mora, who began to use his billet; and in the struggle that resulted Charles escaped and Mora was wounded in each hand and the hip. Charles now took refuge in a small house on Fourth Street, and when he was surrounded, with deadly aim he shot and instantly killed the first two officers who appeared.216 The other men advancing, retreated and waited until daylight for reënforcement, and Charles himself withdrew to other quarters, and for some days his whereabouts were unknown. With the new day, however, the city was wild with excitement and thousands of men joined in the search, the newspapers all the while stirring the crowd to greater fury. Mobs rushed up and down the streets assaulting Negroes wherever they could be found, no effort to check them being made by the police. On the second night a crowd of nearly a thousand was addressed at the Lee Monument by a man from Kenner, a town a few miles above the city. Said he: "Gentlemen, I am from Kenner, and I have come down here to-night to assist you in teaching the blacks a lesson. I have killed a Negro before and in revenge of the wrong wrought upon you and yours I am willing to kill again. The only way you can teach these niggers a lesson and put them in their place is to go out and lynch a few of them as an object lesson. String up a few of them. That is the only thing to do—kill them, string them up, lynch them. I will lead you. On to the parish prison and lynch Pierce." The mob now rushed to the prison, stores and pawnshops being plundered on the way. Within the next few hours a Negro was taken from a street car on Canal Street, killed, and his body thrown into the gutter. An old man of seventy going to work in the morning was fatally shot. On Rousseau Street the mob fired into a little cabin; the inmates were asleep and an old woman was killed in bed. Another old woman who looked out from her home was beaten into insensibility. A man sitting at his door was shot, beaten, and left for dead. Such were the scenes that were enacted almost hourly from Monday until Friday evening. One night the excellent school building given by Thomy Lafon, a member of the race and a philanthropist, was burned.