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1900 |
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| South America & Caribbean:The Panama Canal Treaty is signed and digging begins on the link between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. | |||||||||||
| North America:The eighteenth Democratic national convention meets in Kansas City, Missouri to nominate William Jennings Bryan.
The twelfth Republican national convention meets in Philadelphia to nominate William McKinley. |
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| Europe: Events in Europe this year influencing Louisiana. | |||||||||||
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January 1900
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February 1900
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March 1900
William W. Heard becomes Governor of Louisiana. May 21 When Murphy James Foster leaves office the next day the state legislature votes to send him to the U. S. Senate to succeed Caffery. |
April 1900
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May 1900
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June 1900
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July 1900
On a hot July 23, 1900 evening three policemen stop to question Robert Charles and an acquaintance who were sitting on a white family's steps. When the imposing Charles stood up he was grabbed by one of the patrolmen who pulled a gun. Shots were exchanged, Charles escaped with a thigh wound. One of the officers was also wounded. Later that night when several officers caught up with him that evening at 2023 Fourth St. Charles shot and killed two of them. Again he escaped. The next day rioting started and black citizens were attacked by angry white mobs. Several blacks were killed and two days later martial law was declared and Mayor Paul Capedeville closed all the saloons. A school on Seventh Street for blacks named in honor of Thomy Lafon was burned down. Most of the city's newspapers, with the exception of the Item fanned the flames of anarchy. Charles found refuge at 1200 Saratoga St. On July 27 his hideout was discovered. In the firefight that ensued five more people were killed by Charles and over twenty wounded before he was finally killed. Originally from Copiah County, Mississippi, Charles had been working in New Orleans for half a decade. His employers had always known him as good, honest reliable, quiet and above the average in intelligence. He belonged to the International Migration Society, a back-to-Africa group, and promoted Voice of Missions Magazine. Reports of lynchings and fraudulent elections were known to have angered him. Charles' death and the riots that roiled around it were the result of racial abuses and laws the Jim Crow Era kept blacks in a menial and oppressive existence. Blacks stayed out of trouble through acquiesence, but violent feelings were often just below the surface. |
August 1900
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September 1900
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October 1900
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November 1900
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December 1900
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| Kate Gordon assumes leadership of the suffrage movement in Louisiana and addresses the National American Woman Suffrage Association in 1900 and drew the meeting to New Orleans in 1903. She had little sentiment for black suffrage though and would work against a federal suffrage amendment. | Gus Mayer opens its doors on Canal Street in 1900 and will sell upscale women’s clothing in the New Orleans area until 1987. | William Sidney Porter will become the nation’s best known short story writer as O’Henry works for the Picayune. Dr. Walter Reed, while tending to troops in Cuba, confirms that the yellow fever disease is spread by mosquito. Seventeen year old Guy Ross Molony (1883-1972) returns to New Orleans after warfare adventuring in South Africa with the British against the Boers. He is discovered by Lee Christmas who persuades Molony to be his chief of artillery in his machine gun regiment. Later he finds out that there is only one machine gun and that he is the only man in the regiment. Molony follows in the foot steps of Christmas, rising in the ranks of Central American armies. |
BIRTHS Trumpeter and band leader Paul Mares and Clarinetist and band leader George Lewis. Paul Mares (1900-1949) talked his father, a prosperous dealer in fur pelts, into signing for him to join the Marines during World War I. He was too young, 17, but the war was over before he got to see action, so he returned to join his father’s business. The family lost just about everything in the depression. Paul took up the trumpet and started playing at the Bucktown Tavern including Leon Rappolo, clarinetist. The tried Chicago, where the real jazz was at the time. He lined up some New Orleans Musicians, named them the New Orleans Rhythm Kings and inspired other fine jazz musicians such as Benny Goodman and Bix Beiderbecke. Jelly Roll Morton set in for a few of his recording in 1923, the first time that black and white musicians recorded together. He loses the music for a while and opens the P&M New Orleans Barbecue in Chicago in the thirties which attracts major jazz names for jam sessions. In this decade the muffuletta sandwich is born at the Central Grocery. It is invented by proprietor Salvatore Lupo to feed the growing Italian population of the French Quarter |
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