Murder in New Orleans

The Creation of Jim Crow Policing

Jeffrey S. Adler

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780226643458
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

New Orleans in the 1920s and 1930s was a deadly place. In 1925, the city's homicide rate was six times that of New York City and twelve times that of Boston. Jeffrey S. Adler has explored every homicide recorded in New Orleans between 1925 and 1940—over two thousand in all—scouring police and autopsy reports, old interviews, and crumbling newspapers. More than simply quantifying these cases, Adler places them in larger contexts—legal, political, cultural, and demographic—and emerges with a tale of racism, urban violence, and vicious policing that has startling relevance for today.

Murder in New Orleans shows that whites were convicted of homicide at far higher rates than blacks leading up to the mid-1920s. But by the end of the following decade, this pattern had reversed completely, despite an overall drop in municipal crime rates. The injustice of this sharp rise in arrests was compounded by increasingly brutal treatment of black subjects by the New Orleans police department. Adler explores other counterintuitive trends in violence, particularly how murder soared during the flush times of the Roaring Twenties, how it plummeted during the Great Depression, and how the vicious response to African American crime occurred even as such violence plunged in frequency—revealing that the city's cycle of racial policing and punishment was connected less to actual patterns of wrongdoing than to the national enshrinement of Jim Crow. Rather than some hyperviolent outlier, this Louisiana city was a harbinger of the endemic racism at the center of today's criminal justice state. Murder in New Orleans lays bare how decades-old crimes, and the racially motivated cruelty of the official response, have baleful resonance in the age of Black Lives Matter.

CHAPTER 1

“It’s Only Another Negro Fight and Not Important”

A few minutes after 8:00 p.m., on January 18, 1923, twenty-five-year-old Richard Kenney fatally shot twenty-four-year-old Thomas Pepitone on a dimly lit New Orleans street. Both chauffeurs with criminal records and ties to a local gang, the former friends had tussled three times in the previous hour.1 The initial skirmish occurred at the Olympia Pool Room, where Kenney had “playfully” jostled his friend as he entered. Pepitone, however, took umbrage and punched Kenney, and one of Pepitone’s friends bludgeoned Kenney with a billiard cue, gashing his lip and loosening two of his teeth. Fearing that he was about to be “ganged,” Kenney ran, pursued by Pepitone. When he finally outdistanced his rival, Kenney rushed to police headquarters and begged for protection. Captain Robert Stubbs advised Kenney to “avoid” Pepitone and suggested that he file a complaint.2 A short time later, Kenney returned to the pool hall to retrieve his hat; Pepitone attacked him once again, this time with a billiard cue.3 Unbeknownst to Kenney, Pepitone had suspected that he had “informed the police on him” about a previous criminal matter.4 Robert Gonzalez, who knew both men, interceded and pulled the cue away from Pepitone, who quickly drew a knife. Gonzalez also wrestled the blade from the enraged Pepitone. Kenney then proposed that the men “go in the dark and fight fair.”5 Pepitone agreed, and they proceeded to a quiet spot on Iberville Street to resolve their differences with their fists.

Although both men had had run-ins with the law, the police considered Pepitone a particularly “hard customer.”6 Three years earlier, he had participated in a robbery-murder, but the district attorney had released him for lack of evidence.7 He had also been repeatedly arrested on charges ranging from loitering to armed robbery.8 Furthermore, twice Pepitone had failed to appear at court hearings, yet in all but one case the prosecutor or the judge had dropped the charges against him.9

When Kenney and Pepitone, accompanied by friends and assorted members of the city’s Terminal Gang, found a secluded area suitable for settling their “difficulty with their fists,” in a “fair fight,” the latter suddenly brandished a sawed-off billiard cue and advanced toward his former friend. Surprised, Kenney reminded Pepitone of his “promise to fight fair with our fists only.” Pepitone, however, bellowed, “I’m going to ‘bust’ your brains out.” Anticipating that the fair fight might not be entirely fair, Kenney had hedged his bet. When Pepitone moved toward him, Kenney drew his .38 caliber revolver from his pocket and fired twice, hitting his cue-wielding adversary in the head.10 The young gang member crumbled to the ground. Christian Burkhart, a local prizefighter and also a gang member with an extensive criminal record (and who, six months later, would himself be gunned down), stopped a passing motorist and had his friend transported to Charity Hospital, where Thomas Pepitone died three hours later.11

Richard Kenney fled from the scene of the shooting but returned to police headquarters and surrendered.12 The next day, at a preliminary hearing, Kenney told the presiding judge that he shot in self-defense as the armed gangster advanced on him. Although a small crowd had followed the men from the pool hall to Iberville Street and observed the fatal encounter, once in the courtroom no one admitted to witnessing the shooting, and hence the defendant provided the only account of the killing.

The coroner’s report, which was introduced at the hearing, directly challenged Kenney’s version of the fight, stating that Thomas Pepitone had died from brain injuries caused by two bullets entering the back of his skull.13 The police report also disputed Kenney’s narrative and indicated that his shots “had taken effect in the back of [Pepitone’s] head.”14 Similarly, a newspaper description of the fight noted that the victim had been shot in the head from behind, which left the police perplexed, the reporter added, “in view of the fact that Kenney claims he fired when Pepitone was advancing upon him.” According to the New Orleans States’s account, “Kenney could not explain” the contradiction.15 Nevertheless, Judge Alex O’Donnell accepted the shooter’s story, found him not guilty because he had fired in self-defense, and released him.16

The Pepitone homicide occurred during a massive crime wave in New Orleans, and the killing and the legal outcome revealed characteristic features of crime and punishment in New Orleans during the early 1920s. Violent encounters in the city seemed shorn of the rules and “etiquette” that southerners had long trumpeted.17 As Richard Kenney discovered (and as his own behavior affirmed), notions of “honor” and “fair fights” may have been invoked rhetorically, yet they were roundly ignored; killers often ambushed their enemies, regularly shot unsuspecting, unarmed, even sleeping adversaries, and frequently stabbed or shot their victims in the back. Far from being shocked or outraged, journalists reported vicious murders with indifference. “A mere killing,” the New Orleans Times-Picayune explained in 1923, “usually excites no more than passing interest.”18 Nor did cops, prosecutors, judges, or jurors respond with alarm to the epidemic of violence. To the contrary, they most often reacted with purposeful disinterest. Police officers conducted halfhearted investigations; prosecutors routinely dismissed charges against murderers; judges ignored forensic evidence, accepted wildly implausible explanations for violent crimes, and discharged killers; and the twelve white men who sat on Orleans Parish juries rarely convicted defendants in homicide cases, regardless of the class or the race of the killers.19 In the rapid escalation to deadly force, the mismatch in weapons, the capacious assertion of self-defense, and the judge’s blithe release of the killer, the Pepitone case was a typical New Orleans homicide.

Most important, the surge in violence, the casual responses of observers, the feeble reactions of law enforcers, and the feckless efforts of prosecutors, judges, and jurors fed one another, contributing to the city’s skyrocketing homicide rate. A confluence of social and cultural changes, ranging from festering racial tensions to destabilizing demographic shifts, fueled the potential for conflict. As the criminal justice system actively ignored the wave of violence, New Orleanians looked to custom—rather than law—to resolve disputes and increasingly relied on aggressive self-help to settle arguments, redress grudges, even scores, and achieve justice, igniting an explosion in homicide in the city. This institutional breakdown encouraged working-class white New Orleanians, such as Richard Kenney, to bring guns to fistfights, to be prepared to use them, and to shoot their enemies in the back of the head. For African American residents, the combination of the social instability of the early 1920s and weak, indifferent legal institutions proved to be even more toxic, generating both a surge in homicide and a widening race-based gap in lethal violence. By 1925, African American New Orleanians made up slightly over one-fourth of the city’s residents but nearly three-fourths of its killers.20

*

The 1920s spike in murderous violence was not confined to New Orleans. The United States experienced a jarring crime wave during the first quarter of the twentieth century, with the homicide rate jumping 45.3 percent. Between 1920 and 1925, lethal violence rose by 19.2 percent.21 Violent crime increased particularly sharply in large cities. During the early 1920s, Detroit’s homicide rate leaped by 40.9 percent, Philadelphia’s by 45.3 percent, and St. Louis’s by 57.1 percent. Chicago’s homicide rate swelled by 58.7 percent.22

But, even by comparison, New Orleans was horrifically violent: its homicide rate soared by 139.5 percent between 1920 and 1925. By the middle of the decade, its rate of lethal violence was quadruple Philadelphia’s, six times Buffalo’s, and a dozen times Boston’s. New Orleanians slaughtered one another twice as frequently as Chicagoans during the height of Al Capone’s power, and the city had more homicides than the combined totals of Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Vermont, though the population of New England was nearly twenty times greater.23 To be sure, New Orleans was not America’s “murder city,” a distinction that belonged to Memphis, though it was one of the most homicidal urban centers in the nation during the exceptionally violent 1920s (see figure 1.1).24 Noting that New Orleans had more homicides than London, England, with less than one-sixteenth the population, the New Orleans Item in 1922 looked forward to a time when the “unhappy, the jealous, and vicious will not turn their hands so readily to knife and pistol.”25

Fig. 1.1. New Orleans Homicide Rates, 1901–1925. Source: Homicide Reports, Department of Police, New Orleans.

Nearly every form of lethal violence mushroomed in New Orleans during the early 1920s.26 Gun homicide rates, for example, more than doubled, and knife homicide quadrupled. Street violence more than tripled, while killings in homes swelled fourfold between 1920 and 1925. Rates of homicide by men tripled and by women almost quadrupled.27 The surge in local bloodshed also crossed racial lines. Between 1924 and 1926, the rate of homicide by men, by women, by white residents, by African American residents, by spouses, by acquaintances, and occurring in homes and on local streets peaked. The triggers for such violence were bound up in broader social and institutional forces, rather than more ephemeral changes, such as Prohibition or rum-running, whose influence on homicide was negligible.28

So violent was New Orleans during the early 1920s that observers insisted that the carnage became contagious. In many parts of the city, violence begot violence, and survival often required a quick resort to knives, guns, and deadly force.29 Charity Hospital, the public medical-care facility, overflowed with the victims of violent crime.30 In 1925, Rudolph Matas, the president of the American College of Surgeons, reported “the number of gunshot wounds of the abdomen treated at the Charity hospital yearly and collectively is larger than that of another other single institution of the same size and character in the United States and possibly the world.”31 As a result, the hospital emerged as a nationally renowned research center for the treatment of bullet injuries.

Myriad factors contributed to the rising tide of lethal violence, but demographic forces played a prominent role. The population of New Orleans surged during the 1920s, swelling by 18.5 percent and growing 30.3 percent faster than during the 1910s, as newcomers—including a massive flow of farmers from the lower Mississippi Valley—poured in from the surrounding region. Most were poor and young, with the proportion of New Orleans residents in their twenties hitting a peak during the early 1920s. And many were African American, for the city’s African American population increased twice as fast as the white population during the 1920s. With this teeming population, and with sex ratios out of balance as a consequence of migration, New Orleans possessed the perfect demographic recipe for a spike in violence.32 Not surprisingly, the city’s homicide rate soared, and both victims and their killers were especially young during the early 1920s; nearly half were between twenty and thirty years old. On average, victims and killers in New Orleans were two years younger than their counterparts during the 1930s. Furthermore, two-thirds of those involved in homicides in this era either held unskilled positions or lived in households headed by unskilled workers; across racial lines, lethal violence was concentrated among the poorest New Orleanians.

But population shifts, by themselves, did not trigger violence. Topographical conditions contributed as well, exacerbating demographic pressures and social tensions in the city. Swamps covered most of early twentieth-century New Orleans, precluding real estate development. As a result, during the 1920s the population remained confined to roughly one-quarter of the city’s land, crowded on the high ground hugging the Mississippi River. The lion’s share of the terrain to the north, between the river and Lake Pontchartrain, was either partially or entirely submerged. Although the city undertook efforts to drain the bayous of Orleans Parish, installing an electric pump in 1917, the reclamation process was slow.33 As late as 1934, only 30 percent of the city’s 366 square miles of land could support structures.34 New Orleans’s population density appeared modest in comparison with other large cities, with a level one-seventh that of Philadelphia, one-sixth that of Pittsburgh, and one-third that of Richmond.35 But residents of the Louisiana city faced horrific overcrowding, since they were concentrated on limited high ground. This in turn created pronounced housing shortages.36

Under these demographic pressures, New Orleans’s complex social geography began to collapse. Rich and poor, white and African American, native-born and foreign-born residents had long lived in close proximity there, contributing to the city’s distinctive cultural tapestry.37 African American New Orleanians, especially those working as servants, often resided near their employers, in an arrangement known as the “back-yard pattern.”38 Hence, as late as the 1920s, the city had low levels of racial segregation and no major African American neighborhoods. Instead, African American residents concentrated in small pockets near affluent white residents.39 While New Orleans had a few ethnic neighborhoods, the city’s foreign-born population was modest, and tiny clusters, rather than the large immigrant “colonies” of northern urban centers, predominated.40 The bayous of the lower Mississippi Valley, moreover, prevented these pockets and clusters from expanding to accommodate newcomers during the early 1920s.41 When migrants arrived in large numbers, living conditions deteriorated.

Death rates ballooned, and epidemiological and social crises overlapped. New Orleans’s mortality rate climbed by 9.1 percent between 1920 and 1925. Deaths from heart disease soared, especially among poor and African American New Orleanians. The collision of demographic changes and ecological pressures contributed to social instability as well. The city’s suicide rate, for instance, leaped by 48.6 percent between 1920 and 1925.42

Soon, the boundaries between these pockets crumbled. So too did boundaries between and within households. The housing shortage produced...