Prophets of the Storm: Race, Power, and the New Orleans Crisis of 1900

Abstract

This dissertation builds outward from a chance encounter between New Orleans police officers and a black laborer named Robert Charles during the summer of 1900, unpacking the structural and institutional forces that contributed to a sudden, unexpected crisis and charting the profound consequences of the week-long series of shootouts and race riots that resulted from the confrontation. Examining the motivations, hopes, and fears of municipal politicians, commercial elites, black professionals, colored leaders, and disillusioned workingmen, this project sketches the opportunities and challenges facing residents of both races and widely varying backgrounds in turn-of-the-century New Orleans, while reconsidering the complex intersection of labor and racial unrest in the South’s largest metropolis. My research complicates historiographical depictions of the emerging Jim Crow South as a region in the throes of “redemption,” arguing that class struggles and political rivalries made late-nineteenth-century New Orleans a volatile site in which racial division was far from a foregone conclusion. The crisis of 1900 provided an opportunity for politicians and businessmen to capitalize on nascent alliances to undermine working-class radicalism. By effectively blaming “negro outlaws” for prevailing tensions, accusing white “hoodlums” of perpetrating outrages during the riots, and ultimately crediting the combined efforts of the “better classes” of both races for restoring peace, they sidestepped the destructive results of their own longstanding campaigns to capitalize on racial division and benefitted, politically and economically, from the resulting violence. Often depicted as a place stuck in the past, New Orleans actually served as the testing ground for new strategies of racial and social governance at the turn of the century. Featuring weakened labor organization, increasing levels of police violence, and ambivalent political allies cooperating to suppress working-class radicalism, the city that emerged from the extraordinary turbulence of the period was far more forward-looking than historians have previously understood. By delving into decades of homicide reports and reading official sources against the grain, my dissertation traces the enduring legacy of alliances cemented in the wake of the crisis. It connects one city’s turning point with the enduring struggle to control narratives of justice and responsibility in the aftermath of racial violence.