He believed in self-defense for the African-American community and encouraged Afro Americans to move to Liberia to escape racial discrimination and violence.

[2] Louisiana was a slave society before the American Civil War, with hundreds of enslaved people working on each of numerous large cotton and sugar cane plantations, and many others in smaller groups, including in port cities such as New Orleans.

The white-dominated legislature, primarily Democrats, had passed a new state constitution in 1898 with provisions that disenfranchised most African Americans by making voter registration more difficult, through poll taxes, literacy tests and similar measures.

Plessy vs. Ferguson (1896) was a Louisiana test case of segregation on interstate railroad cars, which was appealed to the US Supreme Court.

Opponents argued that federal laws and constitutional rights should apply on interstate transportation, but the Court ruled the state could establish "separate but equal" facilities.

Historian William Ivy Hair has written, "Signs of increasing animosity between the races were to be seen almost daily in New Orleans during June and July 1900.

"[5] New Orleans newspapers contributed to racial tensions, as they were "becoming more stridently racist in their editorial columns and treatment of the news.

"[6] In southern Louisiana, African Americans had been allowed much more freedom than in other areas, largely owing to the racial demographics in New Orleans particularly and its history.

Robert Charles was classified as mixed-race (mulatto in the terms of the time) and his ancestors may have been free before the Civil War.

In colonial French society, free people of color had more rights and often gained education, property and more skilled jobs and professions.

Captain Day and a patrol wagon approached Charles's residence on the 2000 block of Fourth Street at approximately 3 a.m. on the morning of July 24, 1900.

Other officers, upon hearing the gunshots, quickly brought in reinforcements to both surround Charles and to protect the black residents from white mob violence.

Historian William Ivy Hair described the scene: The Mayor, knowing the mood of the city and fearing that some massive butchery of the black population might take place, called upon the state militia units, which had been mobilized since Thursday, to go to the scene with—and he made a special point of this—their two Gatling guns.

As he tried to escape, he was shot by Charles A. Noiret, a medical student and member of the special police (a militia group of volunteer citizens).

Police had difficulty taking Charles' body to the morgue as angry white mobs tried to mutilate his corpse.

Several days later, Lewis Forstall murdered Fred Clark for tipping off police to Charles' whereabouts.

Lillian Jewett, a young white member of the Anti-Lynching League, was fundraising at a Boston, Massachusetts meeting hours after Charles' death to raise money for the injured in New Orleans.

A group of wealthy young white men from New Orleans had formed the Green Turtles the previous year.

New Orleans jazz pianist Jelly Roll Morton recounted the 1900 riot in his 1938 oral history recorded for the Library of Congress.