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

by Gary Krist

  But in those final years of the nineteenth century, another young black man—somewhat older than Bolden—had come to New Orleans with some subversive new ideas of his own. He was not a loud and flashy musician; most who knew him even described him as quiet, scholarly, and unassuming. But Robert Charles, a former railroad maintenance worker from Mississippi, was not one to passively accept the city’s new racial strictures without a fight. And he was soon to challenge the city’s white establishment in a much more overt way—with an act of defiance that would end up altering the racial dynamics of the Crescent City for many years to come.

  ON A DARK, TROPICAL MONDAY EVENING IN JULY OF 1900, two black men sat quietly on the front steps of a house on Dryades Street in Uptown New Orleans. It was nearly eleven o’clock, and they had been waiting there for some time. The two were hoping to visit some female friends who lived down the block, but since the friends were renting the back room of a white woman’s house, they all had to be somewhat discreet. The landlady would certainly not allow a late-night visit, especially not by two black suitors of her tenants. So the men were biding their time, waiting for the lights to go out in the front room of the house.

  The two men—Robert Charles, thirty-four years old, and his much younger friend, Lenard Pierce—were roommates, living in a single room of a cottage on Fourth Street, just a few blocks away. They had known each other for years, and in fact may have been cousins, though it was only recently that they had moved in together. Charles had just lost his job at a lumberyard the month before, and after moving around for a while to ever-cheaper lodgings, he had eventually convinced his friend to share the room on Fourth so that they could split their living expenses. Pierce, also unemployed, had been more than willing to agree, eager to vacate the house where he had lived with his now-separated parents. Besides, Charles was an agreeable roommate, very easy to get along with. Intelligent and bookish, he carried himself with an “air of elegance” accentuated by his well-tailored clothes and ever-present black bowler hat. But although Charles seemed peaceable enough to most people who knew him, some friends noted an underlying resentment beneath his surface good nature. The plight of the black man in the New Orleans of 1900 did not sit well with Robert Charles, and he had become increasingly angry at the growing injustices he saw all around him.

  Certainly he had concrete reasons for feeling resentful. No black man in that era was a stranger to intimidation and bigotry, but Charles had seen more than his share. Born just after the Civil War into a family of sharecroppers in rural Pine Bluff, Mississippi, he had witnessed firsthand the violent reassertion of white supremacy that had followed the collapse of Reconstruction in the South. During the 1883 elections in his native Copiah County, young Robert and his family had been forced to flee their home and hide in the woods for days on end to avoid marauding gangs of whites determined to control the election by terrorizing any blacks who might have the audacity to try to vote. One African American church was burned to the ground, and numerous black leaders were dragged from their homes and threatened with lynching if they dared to intervene.

  After that fraudulent and violent election, many demoralized blacks migrated out of Copiah County—and Robert Charles was one of them. He moved to Vicksburg, some thirty miles away, and found employment on the Louisville, New Orleans, and Texas Railroad. But things didn’t go well for him there, either. In May of 1892, during a dispute about a stolen pistol, Charles got involved in a shootout with a white railroad flagman. No one was hurt in the incident, but by then Charles knew that a black man could not shoot a gun at a white man without dire consequences in Mississippi, no matter what the provocation. And so he became something of a fugitive, traveling around the state for months under the alias Curtis Robinson.

  By late 1894, he had found his way to New Orleans. Still living under his assumed name, he worked on and off as a manual laborer and a seasonal contractor, hiring black New Orleanians to work as extra hands on sugar plantations outside the city. He also earned some money distributing literature for the International Migration Society, an organization for American blacks who wanted to migrate to Africa. Charles had joined the society in May of 1896, and had even paid a deposit on a voyage to Liberia for himself.

  What caused the thirty-year-old to contemplate such a drastic step is not known for sure, but it likely had to do with the evolving racial attitudes in New Orleans in the 1890s. Having escaped the malignant bigotry of the rural Mississippi of his childhood, he had arrived in the Crescent City just at the time when it was playing catch-up with the rest of the South on issues of white supremacy. By the late ’90s—as Homer Plessy, Buddy Bolden, and every other black New Orleanian could attest—Jim Crow was making the formerly tolerant city far more similar to the rigidly segregated cities in the rest of the South. And the timing of Charles’s application to the migration society was especially significant, having come just one month after the Louisiana election of April 1896—an election that had brought race relations in New Orleans to a new low. It was then that he began distributing migration literature and making plans for his escape to Liberia. It was also then that he began carrying a concealed pistol in his pocket whenever he left his home. And that pistol was with him now, as he and Lenard Pierce sat on the steps of the Dryades house on the night of July 23, 1900, waiting for that light to go out.

  But their presence in the neighborhood had not gone unnoticed. Police sergeant Jules C. Aucoin was making his nightly rounds when, at about eleven P.M., a passerby told him of “two suspicious-looking Negroes” sitting in front of a house on the next block. Aucoin gathered up two more patrolmen—August T. Mora and Joseph D. Cantrelle—and enlisted them to help him investigate. They found Charles and Pierce on the steps of 2815 Dryades and demanded to know what they were doing there. According to later testimony by Patrolman Mora, the men gave a vague answer about “waiting for a friend.” Then Charles, for whatever reason, stood up. Mora apparently interpreted this as an aggressive move. “I grabbed him,” the patrolman said. “The Negro pulled, but I held fast, and he finally pulled me into the street. Here I began using my billet and the Negro jerked from my grasp and ran.”

  Mora seemed confused about exactly what happened next. In one interview, he claimed that Charles pulled out his pistol first; in later testimony, he said that he himself was the first to draw his gun. Either way, the two were soon shooting at each other, with Patrolman Cantrelle also taking several shots at the retreating black man.

  It was over very quickly. Charles, who had been hit in the thigh, was nonetheless able to sprint down the street, with Cantrelle on his heels. Mora lay in the street, bleeding from a wound to the hip. Lenard Pierce, meanwhile, sat frozen on the steps, staring at Aucoin’s “big Colt revolver” aimed straight at his head.

  One of the most violent weeks in New Orleans history had just begun.

  AN hour later, Lenard Pierce was sitting in the Sixth Precinct station, charged with shooting at Sergeant Aucoin. The charge was bogus, of course—even Aucoin himself denied it—but it was intended to frighten the terrified youth into telling what he knew about the man who did shoot at the police. And Pierce was forthcoming—to a degree. He told Capt. John T. Day that his companion was named “Robinson” (he knew Charles’s real name but chose to reveal only his alias) and that he was from Mississippi. Pierce claimed to know little about him other than that.

  Captain Day had in the meantime assigned several patrolmen to return to the scene and try to follow the trail of blood from the wounded man’s leg. This, however, proved fruitless; the trail petered out after a few hundred feet, and the patrolmen eventually had to return to the station empty-handed. But by then Captain Day had learned the assailant’s real name and home address—either from Pierce or by some other means. When he met the search party at the door of the station, he was smiling. “I know where I can get that nigger now,” he said.

  The captain’s instinct was right. Charles, after shrewdly running in the opposite direction from his h
ome for a few blocks, had doubled back and headed toward his room at the Fourth Street cottage. Once there, he had wrapped his leg wound in green gauze and armed himself with a .38-caliber Winchester rifle that he’d borrowed from his brother some time before. Charles may have intended to move on from there to a different hiding place, but he was still home when, at about three A.M., Captain Day and six police officers pulled up at the yellow cottage in a police wagon.

  Day instructed three of the officers to remain with the wagon. Then he took the other three—including Sergeant Aucoin, from the earlier incident—to the gate at the side of the house. By the light of kerosene lanterns, they could see that the gate led to a dark, covered alleyway running past six separate doors, each one the entrance to a one-room apartment in the cottage.

  Captain Day opened the gate. He and the other officers—along with a civilian bystander who had volunteered to go with them—then stepped along the alley’s plank walkway to the first door and knocked. A woman, apparently roused from sleep, came to the door. Day demanded to know which door belonged to the room shared by “those men,” and the woman seemed to realize immediately whom they meant. “In Room Number Four,” she told them. The five men continued down the walkway to the fourth door in the line. They noticed that it was already slightly ajar.

  “Open up there!” one of the officers shouted.

  The door swung open to reveal Robert Charles standing in the dim light. He was holding the rifle, aimed directly at Captain Day.

  Without any hesitation, Charles fired. The bullet struck Day in the chest; according to later testimony, the captain spun around, gave “an awful moaning cry,” and collapsed dead onto the plank walkway.

  For almost fifteen seconds after the shot, no one moved, all—including Charles himself—apparently incredulous at what had just happened. Then the civilian bolted down the alley and back to the street. “My God,” he shouted, “I think they have killed Captain Day!” But the other patrolmen remained standing in the alley as if paralyzed by disbelief—until Charles fired a few more bullets into Captain Day’s sprawled body, lifted the rifle, and fired another shot that virtually shattered a second policeman’s skull.

  At this, Aucoin and the other surviving patrolman—Cpl. Ernest J. Trenchard—came to their senses and began to return fire. But Charles had by now slammed his door shut and was reloading the Winchester. During the lull in gunfire, the door to the second room on the alley opened. A young black woman—later identified as Annie Cryder—beckoned to the men in the alley. “Come in, Officers! Come in here!” she hissed at them. Aucoin and Trenchard gladly complied. They rushed to the offered refuge just as Charles reopened the door to his room and stepped into the alley. Annie Cryder slammed her own door shut and then blew out her lamp, plunging the room into darkness.

  For several minutes, nothing happened. Charles began pacing the plank walkway outside, his measured footsteps clearly audible on the creaking boards. He was muttering curses under his breath, ridiculing the policemen through the closed door and daring them to leave their hiding place. But Aucoin and Trenchard didn’t move.

  Out on the street, meanwhile, the three policemen stationed there by Captain Day—incredibly—did nothing. After hearing the shots and the shout of the fleeing civilian volunteer, one of them—Cpl. Honore Perrier—told the other two to run around the block to the back of the building to cut off any escape Charles might attempt. But when nothing else happened after many minutes, they returned and consulted with Perrier. Finally, at about three thirty A.M.—a full half hour after the first shots had been heard—one of them walked up to the cottage gate and called out: “Do you need any assistance in there?” But there was no answer, so he returned to his place. And there the officers just waited.

  About an hour later, they saw a dark figure come up to the end of the alley. It was Charles, and as they watched, he lifted his rifle and took a potshot at Corporal Perrier; the bullet narrowly missed his head and embedded itself in a pole behind him. At this, the three officers ran away—ostensibly, they later claimed, to find a telephone to call for assistance. Why this had not occurred to them earlier is a mystery. In any case, one of them rang up the station from a nearby pharmacy and reported “considerable firing” at the Fourth Street cottage. Reinforcements were immediately dispatched. Then the three policemen returned to the scene of the shooting—though they maintained a safe distance from the gate at the side of the cottage.

  At five A.M., just as dawn was breaking, Aucoin and Trenchard carefully opened the door to Room Two and peered out into the murkily lit alley. They had heard no movement out there for some time, and when they saw no sign of the gunman, they piled out of the doorway and ran down the alley to the street. Several units of police had by now gathered on the scene. Aucoin and Trenchard told them what had happened, and when they felt they had enough men, they all cautiously approached the gate. Eventually, they felt it was safe to enter the alley. The two dead officers lay just where they had fallen hours earlier. But Charles was nowhere to be seen. And though the police now conducted an extensive search of the cottage and the surrounding neighborhood, they were obviously too late. Robert Charles—with his Winchester rifle and his pistol—was already long gone.

  By seven A.M., nearly every police officer in the city of New Orleans was on the scene, along with scores of armed would-be vigilantes from the neighborhood. Police and several white civilians were ransacking the room of the man they now knew as Robert Charles, looking for evidence. Others were scouring the neighborhood for any sign of the man. The scene was chaotic—and volatile. When one witness claimed to have seen Charles ducking into a backyard privy, the reaction was swift. “In a moment, a hundred or more infuriated men had run into the yard,” the Item reported. “Quicker than work could tell, they had torn up the floor of the vault and a veritable hail of lead … was being poured into the dark hole.” The outhouse was then pushed off its foundation and the pit below it was dragged, but the hole yielded only human waste and soiled paper.

  Meanwhile, the discovery of Charles’s cache of migration literature was fueling speculation that he was some kind of fanatical race agitator intent on “evil toward the white man.” This revelation only stoked the anger of the crowd and hardened its determination to find him. Soon alleged sightings of the gunman were sending mobs of vigilantes out into an ever-widening area of the city. According to rumors, Superintendent of Police Gaster “wanted that man badly,” and had allegedly told searchers “not to hesitate in shooting the villain if he showed the slightest attempt to fight.”

  By midday, the largest manhunt in the history of New Orleans was turning the city upside down. Trains and ferries were stopped; citizen volunteers watched all major roads in the parish. Police were conducting floor-by-floor searches in public and private buildings throughout the city, as well as in Kenner, Gretna, and even as far away as Natchez and Vicksburg, Mississippi, where it was said some of Charles’s relatives lived. The hunt for the man the Times-Democrat was now calling “one of the most formidable monsters that has ever been loose upon the community” went on for hours—and ultimately for days—but without success.

  The ease with which Charles had eluded them caused considerable consternation among his would-be captors, and it wasn’t long before this frustration was being vented on a more available target—namely, the city’s black population. On Tuesday, the first day of the fruitless search, a few skirmishes broke out between groups of whites and blacks, mostly in the vicinity of the Fourth Street cottage. Police arrested many blacks who appeared to be sympathetic to the missing man—and even one white visitor from New York who merely suggested that Charles may have shot the three policemen in self-defense. At the Sixth Precinct station house, threats to lynch Charles’s “accomplice” forced Superintendent Gaster to move Lenard Pierce to the relative safety of Orleans Parish Prison. But white crowds became increasingly belligerent over the course of the day, until rumors that Charles had been captured in suburban Kenner calmed s
ome of their ire. Even so, by midnight there were numerous reports of black men and even women being beaten by the roving mobs.

  By morning, when word spread that Charles had not been captured after all, the violence escalated again. Encouraged by inflammatory editorials in the morning newspapers—in particular a Times-Democrat piece that essentially blamed the black race “as a class” for the crimes of its individual members—gangs of openly armed men raced through the streets of New Orleans, terrorizing any black person they could find. The atmosphere only worsened when the first edition of the afternoon States appeared. An editorial entitled NEGRO MURDERERS—written by the newspaper’s notoriously racist editor, Henry J. Hearsey—all but called upon the city’s white male population to retaliate in kind for what amounted to a secret and widespread black insurrection: “We know not, it seems, what hellish dreams are arising underneath; we know not what schemes of hate, or arson, or murder and rape are being hatched in the dark depths,” Hearsey warned. “We are, and we should realize it, under the regime of the free Negro, in the midst of a dangerous element of servile uprising, not for any real cause, but from the native race hatred of the Negro.”

  Not that many white New Orleanians—frustrated by increasing job competition with blacks—needed much encouragement. On Wednesday night, violence spread throughout the city. A mob of some two thousand whites formed in Lee Circle, at the foot of the towering monument to the Confederate general. In a scene hauntingly reminiscent of W. S. Parkerson’s rally against the Hennessy acquittals just nine years earlier, several orators spoke to the throng, inciting them to outrage, urging them to save the good name of New Orleans by punishing a black population that was clearly sheltering the murderous fiend in their midst. And so again an armed mob surged through the streets of New Orleans, with spectators cheering them on from the sidelines. Again “justice” was going to be served—only this time the victims were to be innocent blacks rather than innocent Italians.