1900
A01=K. Stephen Prince
African American history
archive
armed self-defense
Author_K. Stephen Prince
Category=DNB
Category=DNBM
Category=JBSL
Category=NHK
crime
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=0
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
forgetting
Henry McNeal Turner
historical methodology
Ida B. Wells-Barnett
Jim Crow
Liberian
Liberian emigration
Louisiana
lynching
mass incarceration
memory
mob
New Orleans
New Orleans Police Department
New Orleans race riot
New Orleans riot
Race
racial violence in the Jim Crow South
riot
Robert Charles
silence
southern history
violence
white supremacy
Product details
- ISBN 9781469661810
- Weight: 540g
- Dimensions: 155 x 233mm
- Publication Date: 01 Mar 2021
- Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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For a brief moment in the summer of 1900, Robert Charles was arguably the most infamous black man in the United States. After an altercation with police on a New Orleans street, Charles killed two police officers and fled. During a manhunt that extended for days, violent white mobs roamed the city, assaulting African Americans and killing at least half a dozen. When authorities located Charles, he held off a crowd of thousands for hours before being shot to death. The notorious episode was reported nationwide; years later, fabled jazz pianist Jelly Roll Morton recalled memorializing Charles in song. Yet today, Charles is almost entirely invisible in the traditional historical record. So who was Robert Charles, really? An outlaw? A black freedom fighter? And how can we reconstruct his story?
In this fascinating work, K. Stephen Prince sheds fresh light on both the history of the Robert Charles riots and the practice of history-writing itself. He reveals evidence of intentional erasures, both in the ways the riot and its aftermath were chronicled and in the ways stories were silenced or purposefully obscured. But Prince also excavates long-hidden facts from the narratives passed down by white and black New Orleanians over more than a century. In so doing, he probes the possibilities and limitations of the historical imagination.
In this fascinating work, K. Stephen Prince sheds fresh light on both the history of the Robert Charles riots and the practice of history-writing itself. He reveals evidence of intentional erasures, both in the ways the riot and its aftermath were chronicled and in the ways stories were silenced or purposefully obscured. But Prince also excavates long-hidden facts from the narratives passed down by white and black New Orleanians over more than a century. In so doing, he probes the possibilities and limitations of the historical imagination.
K. Stephen Prince is an associate professor of history at the University of South Florida. He is also author of Stories of the South: Race and the Reconstruction of Southern Identity, 1865-1915.
