From Robert Charles to ICE: Echoes of State Violence and Resistance in America

The summer heat bore down on New Orleans that July night in 1900 when gunfire first cracked the air. Robert Charles, a Black laborer who had dared to sit on a porch in a white neighborhood, would be dead within four days—his body riddled with bullets, then mutilated by a mob drunk on the kind of rage that newspapers cultivated and police sanctioned. Before he fell, Charles killed several officers in what he surely understood would be his final stand. The city erupted. White mobs roamed the streets hunting Black residents. At least 28 people died, most of them Black civilians guilty of nothing more than existing in the wrong place during a wave of sanctioned terror.

The rhetoric that summer was familiar: dangerous criminals, threats to public safety, the necessity of force. Charles was not portrayed as a man defending himself against a violent arrest in a society that offered him no legal protection. He was a monster to be exterminated, and the Black community that harbored him deserved collective punishment. Two Black schools burned to ash. Dozens lay wounded. The state violence was surgical in its targets, theatrical in its excess.

More than a century later, the same language of fear and control echoes through the detention centers and deportation raids of today.

July 1900: A City Ignites

The confrontation began on the evening of July 23, when New Orleans police officers approached Charles and his roommate Leonard Pierce as they sat waiting on a porch. The details of who provoked whom remain contested, filtered as they are through the lens of newspapers that presumed Black guilt and white innocence. What is known: an altercation occurred, shots were fired, both Charles and an officer were wounded, and Charles fled into the night.

By the early morning of July 24, police had located Charles’s lodging on Fourth Street. When they attempted to arrest him, Charles opened fire from a second-story window. The exchange lasted hours. Charles, a self-educated man who had advocated for Black emigration to Liberia and the right to armed self-defense, held off dozens of officers and deputized white civilians. He knew what capture meant: not trial, but lynching.

Contemporary accounts describe a siege. Special deputies—armed white men eager to join the hunt—surrounded the building. On July 27, they set the building ablaze to force Charles out. When he emerged, attempting to escape through the flames, he was shot repeatedly. His body was then seized by the white mob and desecrated in the street.

But Charles’s death did not end the violence. For days afterward, white mobs terrorized New Orleans’s Black neighborhoods, attacking residents at random, burning property, enforcing through brutality what the law had already codified: that Black life could be extinguished with impunity. Final tallies recorded approximately 28 dead, though the true number may never be known. Between 50 and 60 more were wounded. Among the casualties were two Black schools, reduced to smoking ruins as symbols of what white supremacy could not tolerate—Black education, Black autonomy, Black futurity.

Robert Charles was born around 1865 in Mississippi, into the brief hope of Reconstruction. He came of age watching that promise strangled by Jim Crow laws, lynch mobs, and the systematic disenfranchisement of Black voters. He moved to New Orleans seeking work and found instead the same violent oppression he had fled. By the accounts of those who knew him, Charles read voraciously, discussed politics, and believed in Black self-determination. He subscribed to the idea that if America would not grant Black people citizenship in deed as well as word, perhaps they should seek it elsewhere—in Liberia, in spaces where they might govern themselves.

This was his crime: consciousness. The belief that his life had value. The willingness to defend it.

The historical record is clear about the context. This was the nadir of American race relations, the high Jim Crow era when Southern states competed to devise the most baroque methods of segregation and control. Lynchings were not aberrations but public spectacles, often advertised in advance, attended by thousands, photographed for postcards. Between 1890 and 1910, an average of two to three Black Americans were lynched every week. The press routinely justified these murders with fabricated narratives of Black criminality. Law enforcement collaborated openly with lynch mobs or stood aside.

The Robert Charles riots represented something Southern white power structures found particularly threatening: armed Black resistance. Charles was not passive in his own destruction. He fought back, and in doing so, he became in the white imagination something even more dangerous than the racist caricatures they trafficked in—he became real, autonomous, uncontrollable. The ferocity of the response, the way white violence spilled beyond Charles to engulf entire Black neighborhoods, revealed the riot’s true purpose: reasserting through terror what Jim Crow reasserted through law.

William Ivy Hair’s exhaustive 1976 study, Carnival of Fury: Robert Charles and the New Orleans Race Riot of 1900, remains the definitive account, drawing on newspaper archives, court records, and oral histories to reconstruct not just the events but the racial ecosystem that produced them. More recently, K. Stephen Prince’s The Ballad of Robert Charles (2021) has reexamined the riots through the lens of memory, asking how such events are forgotten, sanitized, or distorted over time. Both scholars emphasize that Charles was not simply a victim or a villain, but a man who made choices within a system designed to strip him of all choice.

The Architecture of Control: Then and Now

The mechanisms of state violence evolve; their targets remain consistent.

In 1900, police power in New Orleans operated with the understanding that Black bodies could be surveilled, detained, and destroyed without meaningful oversight. Officers needed no warrant to approach Charles and Pierce, no cause beyond the fact of their Blackness in a “white” space. When Charles defended himself, the full apparatus of the state mobilized—not just law enforcement, but volunteer deputies, militia, and tacitly sanctioned mob violence. The press inflamed public rage with racist narratives. The courts, stacked with white judges and juries from which Black citizens were systematically excluded, ensured no accountability for the massacre that followed.

Today, Immigration and Customs Enforcement operates within a parallel architecture of minimal oversight and racialized enforcement. ICE conducts workplace raids, home invasions, and arrests often without judicial warrants, relying instead on administrative orders issued by the agency itself. Detainees are held in facilities where reports of abuse, medical neglect, and deaths have mounted for years. Between 2003 and 2023, at least 183 people died in ICE custody, according to data compiled by the ACLU and immigrant rights organizations. Many deaths involved inadequate medical care for treatable conditions. Others resulted from suicide after prolonged detention without due process.

The language of “criminal aliens” and “illegal immigrants” serves the same dehumanizing function that “Black brute” and “dangerous Negro” served in 1900—it transforms people into problems requiring elimination. When ICE raids a workplace or neighborhood, the spectacle is intended to terrorize not just those arrested but entire communities. Families are separated. Children return from school to empty homes. The message is clear: you are not safe, you are not welcome, you can be removed at any moment.

The parallels extend to media complicity. Just as New Orleans newspapers in 1900 published inflammatory accounts that justified white mob violence, modern media outlets often repeat law enforcement framing uncritically, describing raids as “operations” and arrests as “enforcement actions,” sanitizing state violence with bureaucratic language. Detainees become statistics. Suffering becomes policy.

There is also the question of legal recourse—or its absence. In 1900, Black victims of the riots had no realistic path to justice. The courts that should have protected them instead legitimized their persecution. Today, immigrants in detention face a parallel void. Immigration proceedings are civil, not criminal, which means detainees have no right to appointed counsel. Many languish in detention for months or years, their hearings repeatedly postponed, their access to legal resources severely limited. The immigration court system operates under the Department of Justice, the same executive branch that employs ICE—an inherent conflict of interest that would be unthinkable in criminal courts.

Accountability, when it comes at all, arrives late and incomplete. After the Robert Charles riots, a few individuals were arrested, but prosecutions withered in the face of white solidarity and judicial indifference. Similarly, despite extensive documentation of abuses in ICE detention, officers and contractors face little meaningful consequence. The system protects itself.

Resistance as Legacy

To remember Robert Charles only as a victim is to diminish him. He was a man who chose resistance over submission, knowing the cost. In that choice, he asserted his humanity against a society that denied it with every law, every lynching, every casual brutality. His death was brutal, but his life—his refusal to accept the terms of his own oppression—matters more.

Charles’s story belongs to a long tradition of Black resistance in America, from the Underground Railroad to the Civil Rights Movement to contemporary fights against police violence and mass incarceration. These struggles share a common thread: the insistence that dignity is not granted by the state but inherent to human beings, and that defending one’s own humanity is not crime but duty.

This tradition has inspired and intersected with other movements for justice. The same abolitionist spirit that drives contemporary campaigns to end cash bail and defund police militarization also animates the movement to abolish ICE—to dismantle systems built on the presumption that certain bodies are disposable. The same recognition that led Charles to believe in Black self-determination now fuels immigrant-led organizing that refuses to accept detention and deportation as inevitable.

Remembering the Robert Charles riots means acknowledging not just what was done to him and to New Orleans’s Black community, but what they represented: the lengths to which white supremacy will go to maintain control, and the enduring power of resistance against seemingly insurmountable odds. Charles’s story is not a relic of a less enlightened past. It is a map of the present, a reminder that state violence adapts but does not disappear, and that the work of resistance is never finished.

The activists who document deaths in ICE custody, who organize bond funds and legal clinics, who build sanctuary networks—they carry forward the same courage Charles demonstrated. They understand that systems of oppression depend on public indifference, on the normalization of violence against marginalized people. To remember is to resist that normalization.

On July 27, 1900, Robert Charles died in flames and gunfire, his body defiled by a mob that could not tolerate his refusal to accept their vision of his place in the world. More than a century later, people still die in detention centers, still fall to bullets fired by officers who face no accountability, still disappear into bureaucratic systems designed to erase them. The machinery has been modernized, the language sanitized, but the fundamental dynamic persists: the state exercising violence against those it deems expendable, and those victims fighting back however they can.

The same courage that once defied a mob in New Orleans now lives in every person who demands to be seen and treated as human, who refuses to accept that any life is less valuable than another, who understands that the work of building a just world requires remembering honestly the violence that maintains an unjust one.

Robert Charles’s legacy is not the violence of his death but the defiance of his life—the insistence that some things are worth fighting for, even when the fight seems hopeless. That legacy belongs to all who resist, then and now.

July 1900: A City Ignites

The Architecture of Control: Then and Now

Resistance as Legacy

Further Reading: Understanding the Robert Charles Riots