One July week in 1900, an obscure black laborer named Robert Charles drew national headlines when he shot twenty-seven whites in a series of encounters with the New Orleans police. Charles believed it foolish to rely on southern whites to uphold the law, let alone to acknowledge even minimal human rights for blacks, and therefore systematically armed himself, manufacturing round after round of his own ammunition before undertaking his intentionally symbolic act of violent resistance. After the shootings, Charles became an instant hero among some blacks, but to most people he remained a mysterious and sinister figure who had promoted a "back-to-Africa" movement. CARNIVAL OF FURY follows Charles from childhood in a Mississippi sharecropper's cabin to his violent death on New Orleans's Saratoga Street, piecing together the story of a man who tried to achieve dignity and self-respect in a time when people of his race could not exhibit such characteristics without fear of reprisal.

William Ivy Hair (1930-1992) was Fuller E. Callaway Professor of Southern History at Georgia College in Milledgeville, Georgia. He is the author of several books, including The Kingfish and His Realm: The Life and Times of Huey P. Long and Bourbonism and Agrarian Protest: Louisiana Politics, 1877-1900.

 

W. Fitzhugh Brundage is a William B. Umstead Professor of History at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. He is the author of A Socialist Utopia in the New South: The Ruskin Colonies in Tennessee and Georgia, 1894-1901 and Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880-1930.

ISBN: 9780807133347

Paperback

256 pages

6 x 9

Bibliography, Index, Illustrated, Table of Contents

LSU Press, 2008