Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 36, Number 59, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 15 March 1904 — A Race War on the Levee. [ARTICLE]

A Race War on the Levee.

Saturday night Charley Campbell. a young colored man who works in town went into the Rosenbaum saloon on 8. Van Rensselaer street, and some party evidently considerably tinder the influence of booze called him a nigger with several qualifying adjaotives and expletives, attaohed thereto. Campbell returned in kind, and then several others began to hurl hard words at the colored mao, and beer bottles also began to flash in air, in a very menacing manner. The colored man appeared to think the odds were likely to be too heavy against him in the raoe war that whs impending and he drew a big knife whh a long and very business-iiks looking blade, as a part, thereof. The knife and the knigger carried the hoiire by a big majority and the threatened race war was changed to a get outside and during which there were not doors enough to meet tbe demand, and one man broke through the glass in oue door in his hurry to get out, and out himself quite badly. The oolored man surveyed the desert the sight of his big knife had made, and then he went home and went to bed. Later in the night he was arrested on a oharge of drunkenness, and Sunday plead guilty to the oharge before Sqnire Irwin, and was fined $1 and costs or $8 20 in all, whioh he paid. He denied having been drunk however, but said he made the plea of guilty as probably the easiest way out of the trouble though he seemed to understand that the oharge was ohanged to disorderly oonduot. The offioers of the court appeared to adopt the oolored boy’s view that he was not drunk.