Mob Rule in New Orleans: Robert Charles and His Fight to Death, the Story of His Life, Burning Human Beings Alive, Other Lynching Statistics

Ida B. Wells-Barnett was relentless in her documentation of racial violence in America, and this 1900 pamphlet stands as one of her most devastating works. She reconstructs the events of July 1900 in New Orleans, when a confrontation between police and Black laborer Robert Charles escalated into a citywide massacre. What began as an unprovoked police attack on Charles while he simply stood talking with a friend ended with Charles killed and, in the days that followed, mobs of white New Orleanians burning Black residents alive in the streets. Wells compiled newspaper accounts, testimonies, and her own reporting to construct an irrefutable case against the lie that lynching served any form of justice. The result is a damning record of how one man's act of self-defense became the pretext for orgiastic violence against an entire community. This is investigative journalism as resistance: a meticulous accounting of bodies and flames that refuses to let America look away.