n the course of the questioning the larger of
the Negroes, Charles, rose to his feet; he was seized by one of the
officers, Mora, who began to use his billet; and in the struggle that
resulted Charles escaped and Mora was wounded in each hand and the hip.
Charles now took refuge in a small house on Fourth Street, and when he
was surrounded, with deadly aim he shot and instantly killed the first
two officers who appeared.[1] The other men advancing, retreated and
waited until daylight for reenforcement, and Charles himself withdrew to
other quarters, and for some days his whereabouts were unknown. With the
new day, however, the city was wild with excitement and thousands of men
joined in the search, the newspapers all the while stirring the crowd
to greater fury. Mobs rushed up and down the streets assaulting Negroes
wherever they could be found, no effort to check them being made by the
police. On the second night a crowd of nearly a thousand was addressed
at the Lee Monument by a man from Kenner, a town a few miles above the
city. Said he: "Gentlemen, I am from Kenner, and I have come down here
to-night to assist you in teaching the blacks a lesson. I have killed a
Negro before and in revenge of the wrong wrought upon you and yours I am
willing to kill again. The only way you can teach these niggers a lesson
and put them in their place is to go out and lynch a few of them as
an object lesson. String up a few of them. That is the only thing to
do--kill them, string them up, lynch them. I will lead you. On to the
parish prison and lynch Pierce." The mob now rushed to the prison,
stores and pawnshops being plundered on the way. Within the next few
hours a Negro was taken from a street car on Canal Street, killed, and
his body thrown into the gutter. An old man of seventy going to work in
the morning was fatally shot. On Rousseau Street the mob fired into a
little cabin; the inmates were asleep and an old woman was killed in
bed. Another old woman who looked out from her home was beaten into
insensibility. A man sitting at his door was shot, beaten, and left for
dead. Such were the scenes that were enacted almost hourly from Monday
until Friday evening. One night the excellent school building given by
Thomy Lafon, a member of the race and a philanthropist, was burned.

[Footnote 1: From this time forth the wildest rumors were afloat and
the number of men that Charles had killed was greatly exaggerated. Some
reports said sco