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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.
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 the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, the character of the
South, and even its persistence as a distinct region, was an open
question. During Reconstruction, the North assumed significant
power to redefine the South, imagining a region rebuilt and modeled
on northern society. The white South actively resisted these
efforts, battling the legal strictures of Reconstruction on the
ground. Meanwhile, white southern storytellers worked to recast the
South's image, romanticizing the Lost Cause and heralding the birth
of a New South. In Stories of the South, K. Stephen Prince argues
that this cultural production was as important as political
competition and economic striving in turning the South and the
nation away from the egalitarian promises of Reconstruction and
toward Jim Crow. Examining novels, minstrel songs, travel
brochures, illustrations, oratory, and other cultural artifacts
produced in the half century following the Civil War, Prince
demonstrates the centrality of popular culture to the
reconstruction of southern identity, shedding new light on the
complicity of the North in the retreat from the possibility of
racial democracy.
On May 1, 1866, a minor exchange between white Memphis city police
and a group of black Union soldiers quickly escalated into murder
and mayhem. Changes wrought by the Civil War and African American
emancipation sent long-standing racial, economic, cultural, class,
and gender tensions rocketing to new heights. For three days, a mob
of white men roamed through South Memphis, leaving a trail of
blood, rubble, and terror in their wake. By May 3, at least
forty-six African American men, women, and children and two white
men lay dead. An unknown number of black people had been driven out
of the city. Every African American church and schoolhouse lay in
ruins, homes and businesses burglarized and burned, and at least
five women had been raped. As a federal military commander noted in
the days following, "what [was] called the 'riot'" was "in reality
[a] massacre" of extended proportions. It was also a massacre whose
effects spread far beyond Memphis, Tennessee. As the essays in this
collection reveal, the massacre at Memphis changed the trajectory
of the post-Civil War nation. Led by recently freed slaves who
refused to be cowed and federal officials who took their concerns
seriously, the national response to the horror that ripped through
the city in May 1866 helped to shape the nation we know today.
Remembering the Memphis Massacre brings this pivotal moment and its
players, long hidden from all but specialists in the field, to a
public that continues to feel the effects of those three days and
the history that made them possible.
On May 1, 1866, a minor exchange between white Memphis city police
and a group of black Union soldiers quickly escalated into murder
and mayhem. Changes wrought by the Civil War and African American
emancipation sent long-standing racial, economic, cultural, class,
and gender tensions rocketing to new heights. For three days, a mob
of white men roamed through South Memphis, leaving a trail of
blood, rubble, and terror in their wake. By May 3, at least
forty-six African American men, women, and children and two white
men lay dead. An unknown number of black people had been driven out
of the city. Every African American church and schoolhouse lay in
ruins, homes and businesses burglarized and burned, and at least
five women had been raped. As a federal military commander noted in
the days following, "what [was] called the 'riot'" was "in reality
[a] massacre" of extended proportions. It was also a massacre whose
effects spread far beyond Memphis, Tennessee. As the essays in this
collection reveal, the massacre at Memphis changed the trajectory
of the post-Civil War nation. Led by recently freed slaves who
refused to be cowed and federal officials who took their concerns
seriously, the national response to the horror that ripped through
the city in May 1866 helped to shape the nation we know today.
Remembering the Memphis Massacre brings this pivotal moment and its
players, long hidden from all but specialists in the field, to a
public that continues to feel the effects of those three days and
the history that made them possible.
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