Corda e Sapone: how the Italians were lynched in the USA
"It has long been known in the historical documents of the period that rather than being perceived as “white,” Italian immigrants in fact were perceived in the South as enemies of the racist Jim Crow laws. The literature on Sicilians’ widely known resistance to the Jim Crow laws goes back to the 1890s in an article published in the popular Harper’s Magazine. The problem of lynchings became so widespread at the time that a law professor, after the lynching of two Italian immigrants October of 1914 and June of 1915 in Illinois, published an article in the Yale Law Review in which he urged the federal government to override states’ rights and pass federal legislation allowing the federal government to prosecute the perpetrators of the lynchings.
Following the New Orleans 1891 lynchings, in 1896 three more Italian immigrants were taken from the prison in Hahnville, Louisiana, and lynched. Three years after that event, in another of the largest lynchings in the South, five more Sicilian immigrants were lynched in 1899 in Tallulah, Louisiana. The towns’ growing animosity towards two Sicilian store owners was the basis for the killings. Over a period of months, the Sicilian store owners had offended the towns’ racists by refusing to wait on white people before their black customers.
In the wake of the Tallulah lynchings, in a Harper’s Magazine article entitled “Tallulah’s Shame,” the author wrote that “When the Italians first came into Madison, a few years ago, they were a puzzle to the white people of that parish. Like the bat, they were difficult to classify, and this is more difficult because they dealt mainly with the negroes, and associated with them nearly on terms of equality. They could therefore hardly be classed as ‘white men,’ yet they were certainly not negroes. Just how to treat them was a difficult problem. It has finally been settled. They are to get the justice awarded a negro in Madison who assaults, or shoots at, or kills a white man—lynching; not a trial.” The journalist concludes by writing that the dominant white population in Madison is simply not willing to “admit the Italian to their ranks.” This article was unique at the time in the sympathy it expressed for the Italian immigrants."
By all means tell me how aware you are again.
@Beegio
@ridedolo
When Italian immigrants were 'the other' - CNN.com
"There were a number of things that surprised me in my initial research. I knew something about our nation's early antipathy toward Catholics and Italians, but I had not fully appreciated the depth of that antagonism. For example, the largest mass lynching in U.S. history took place in New Orleans in 1891 — and it wasn't African-Americans who were lynched, as many of us might assume. It was Italian-Americans."
