cover image To Poison a Nation: The Murder of Robert Charles and the Rise of Jim Crow Policing in America

To Poison a Nation: The Murder of Robert Charles and the Rise of Jim Crow Policing in America

Andrew Baker. New Press, $27.99 (368p) ISBN 978-1-62097-603-6

Bates College historian Baker debuts with a meticulous account of the confrontation between a Black laborer and white police officers that sparked violent racial unrest in 1900 New Orleans. A transplant from rural Mississippi, Robert Charles was sitting on a stoop in a mixed-race working-class neighborhood when three patrolmen demanded to know what he was doing there. In the ensuing confrontation, Charles shot one of the policemen before fleeing to his apartment, where he killed two others in an ambush. Over the next several days, during the largest manhunt in the city’s history, white mobs attacked Black residents indiscriminately, killing at least seven people before Charles was found and killed in a shoot-out. Baker documents how white business leaders and political power brokers sought to crush tenuous alliances between Black and white laborers who wanted better working conditions, and portrays the city’s police department as the enforcer of strict codes of white supremacy that aimed to keep one of the country’s largest Black populations in its place. Baker provides copious details about the labor and political issues involved, but short-changes the depictions of Black daily life in New Orleans, and an epilogue catching the story up to the present day feels rushed. Still, this is an eye-opening excavation of a little-known American tragedy. (June)