Mob Rule in New Orleans

This is an impressive, moving, and disturbing account of racial violence and lynchings, with the central part of the story focused on the final fight for his life of Robert Charles. Charles appears nearly heroic even as he kills four police officers and two civilians and wounds twenty more by gunfire, because Ida B. Wells-Barnett portrays this as the fallout of an unprovoked assault upon Charles and his desperation to fight against his own lynching by a senseless and enraged mob. The fact that dozens of innocent black men and women, in no way involved with Charles or the police, were murdered throughout many days of attacks and lynchings gives the context to see Charles as a resistance fighter rather than the immoral, savage spree-killer he was portrayed as by most of the white press. None of the ugliness of violence is obscured here, and the author includes an inventory of vicious lynchings and burnings in the south in the late-nineteenth century. (Goodreads)

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