Dan White is another charity hospital patient.  He is a Negro roustabout and was sitting in the bar room at Poydras and Franklin Streets when a mob passed along and espied him.  He was shot in the hand, and would have been roughly dealt with had some policeman not been luckily near and rescued him.

In addition to the Negroes who suffered from the violence of the mob there were several patients treated at the hospital during the night who had been with the rioters and had been struck by stray bullets or injured in scuffles.  None of this class were hurt to any extent.  They got their wounds dressed and went out again.

+WAS CHARLES A DESPERADO?+

The press of the country has united in declaring that Robert Charles was a desperado.  As usual, when dealing with a negro, he is assumed to be guilty because he is charged.  Even the most conservative of journals refuse to ask evidence to prove that the dead man was a criminal, and that his life had been given over to lawbreaking.  The minute that the news was flashed across the country that he had shot a white man it was at once declared that he was a fiend incarnate, and that when he was killed the community would be ridden of a black-hearted desperado.  The reporters of the New Orleans papers, who were in the best position to trace the record of this man’s life, made every possible effort to find evidence to prove that he was a villain unhung.  With all the resources at their command, and inspired by intense interest to paint him as black a villain as possible, these reporters signally failed to disclose a single indictment which charged Robert Charles with a crime.  Because they failed to find any legal evidence that Charles was a lawbreaker and desperado his accusers gave full license to their imagination and distorted the facts that they had obtained, in every way possible, to prove a course of criminality, which the records absolutely refuse to show.

Charles had his first encounter with the police Monday night, in which he was shot in the street duel which was begun by the police after Officer Mora had beaten Charles three or four times over the head with his billy in an attempt to make an illegal arrest.  In defending himself against the combined attack of two officers with a billy and their guns upon him, Charles shot Officer Mora and escaped.

Early Tuesday morning Charles was traced to Dryades Street by officers who were instructed to kill him on sight.  There, again defending himself, he shot and killed two officers.  This, of course, in the eyes of the American press, made him a desperado.  The New Orleans press, in substantiating the charges that he was a desperado, make statements which will be interesting to examine.

In the first place the New Orleans Times-Democrat, of July 25, calls Charles a “ravisher and a daredevil.”  It says that from all sources that could be searched “the testimony was cumulative that the character of the murderer, Robert Charles, is that of a daredevil and a fiend in human form.”  Then in the same article it says: