Italian American experience and race

• In 1790, Congress limited naturalized citizenship to "free white persons, who have, or shall migrate into the United States"
• The increase of culturally diverse immigrants from Europe led to a swift revision in the understanding of racism
• Matthew Frye Jacobson's "Whiteness of a Different Color" explains that the influx of immigrants caused national panic and led to a more restrictive view of whiteness.
• European immigrants were divided into "races," with some deemed "whiter" and more worthy of citizenship
• Italian immigrants went from pariah status in the 19th century to being considered white Americans in good standing in the 20th century.

Racism Towards Italians

• Darker-skinned Southern Italians faced discrimination on both sides of the Atlantic
• Northern Italians considered Southerners, especially Sicilians, as "uncivilized" and racially inferior, akin to being too African to be European
• Magazines and newspapers bombarded Americans with images of Italians as racially suspect
• Italians were excluded from schools, movie houses, labor unions, and sometimes forced to sit in segregated church pews with black people
• Terms like "swarthy" and "kinky haired" were used to describe Italians, associating them with criminality
• Derogatory terms included "dago," "guinea" (a term also applied to enslaved Africans), "white nigger," and "nigger wop"
• Italians who took "black" jobs or lived among African-Americans were marked as black and faced violence
• Mobs hanged, shot, dismembered, or burned alive thousands of black men, women, and children across the South

Columbus Day and Italian-American Assimilation

• The federal holiday honoring Christopher Columbus was central to Italian assimilation
• By the 20th century, Americans fully ratified Italians as white
• The holiday's rationale was based on myth and allowed Italian-Americans to create a laudatory self-portrait

The New Orleans Lynching of 1892

• Few know the holiday's origin, or that President Benjamin Harrison proclaimed in 1892, after a New Orleans lynching that killed 11 Italian immigrants
• The proclamation attempted to quiet outrage and prevent a diplomatic crisis
• Racist stereotypes in Northern newspapers like The Times contributed to America's response to the event

Media Portrayal and Justification of Violence

• Charles Seguin and Sabrina Nardin's analysis reveals the protests by the Italian government was unsuccessful, unlike Ida B. Wells' anti-lynching efforts
• Newspapers in the South advertised public murders of African-Americans in advance to attract crowds
• Victims were labeled "brutes," "fiends," "ravishers," "born criminals," or "troublesome Negroes"
• News organizations legitimized lynching by using racist stereotypes
• Northern newspapers were equally complicit in justifying mob violence
• The Times repeatedly used the headline "A Brutal Negro Lynched," predetermining guilt and portraying victims as congenital criminals
• Lynchings of black men in the South were often based on fabricated accusations of sexual assault
• Rape charges could arise from minor social code violations, such as complimenting or bumping into a white woman

Ida B. Wells and Media Retaliation

• The Times dismissed Ida B. Wells as a "slanderous and nasty-minded mulattress" for describing rape allegations as "a thread bare lie" used against black men with consensual relationships with white women
• Times editors rebuked Wells for representing "black brutes" abroad and joked about "the practice of roasting Negro ravishers alive"
• referred to rape as "a crime to which Negroes are particularly prone" with rhetoric rooted in white supremacy.

Economic Factors and Racial Dynamics

• Italian immigrants were welcomed into Louisiana after the Civil War to replace newly freed black people in need of cheap labor
• The new immigrants became a labor shortage and they would support white domination in the emerging Jim Crow state.
• Louisiana's romance with Italian labor soured when they balked at low wages and working conditions
• Italians chose to live in Italian neighborhoods, spoke their language, preserved their customs, and developed businesses catering to African-Americans
• Proximity to blackness led white Southerners to view Sicilians as not fully white, making them eligible for persecution and lynching
• Jessica Barbata Jackson showed that Italian newcomers were well thought of in New Orleans in the 1870s when negative stereotypes were being established in the Northern press

Media Depictions of Italian Criminality

• The Times described Italians as bandits and members of the criminal classes who were "wretchedly poor and unskilled," "starving and wholly destitute"
• An 1874 story referenced an Italian immigrant seeking vaccinations as resembling "the traditional brigand of the Abruzzi"
• A Times story in 1880 characterized immigrants, including Italians, as "links in a descending chain of evolution"
• An 1882 editorial titled "Our Future Citizens" stated that "There has never been since New York was founded so low and ignorant a class among the immigrants who poured in here as the Southern Italians"
• Italian immigrant children were described as "utterly unfit ragged, filthy, and verminous"

Racist Stereotypes and the Portrayal of Violence

• Newspaper portrayed both black and Italian people as violent people
• An 1887 Times story about a lynching victim in Mississippi, “Dago Joe," who "was the son of a Sicilian father and a mulatto mother, and had the worst characteristics of both races in his makeup"
• The article said he was cunning, treacherous, cruel, and regarded in the community where he lived "as an assassin by nature.”

The Assassination of David Hennessy and its Racist Aftermath

• David Hennessy was assassinated in New Orleans in 1890
• Accusations of Italian involvement led to the charging of 19 Italians based on questionable evidence
• The evidence was weak, with six being acquitted and three granted mistrials
• Elite city leaders advertised their plans well in advance, because they hated the Italians for fraternizing with African-Americans
• The killings were praised by the grand jury calling it "possibly one of the greatest whitewashes in American history.”
• The Times published a news story titled “Chief Hennessy Avenged: Eleven of his Italian Assassins Lynched by a Mob", that the mob had consisted “mostly of the best element” of New Orleans society
• An editorial dehumanized and justified the lynching

"Rattlesnakes"

• The editors described the “These sneaking and cowardly Sicilians" as "the descendants of bandits and assassins" transported to America and as a pest without mitigation
• Editors found it hard "one individual who would confess that privately he deplores it very much.”
• President Harrison responded to the Italian government's demand for an indemnity and broke off diplomatic relations, but failed to respond when black people died
• Harrison called on Congress to protect foreign nationals, but not black Americans from mob violence
• Harrison's Columbus Day proclamation in 1892 was used by Italian-Americans to create a myth.
• Italian-Americans rewrote history by casting Columbus as “the first immigrant", who “discovered” America

Political Exploitation of Anti-Immigrant Sentiment

• Henry Cabot Lodge appropriated the event, arguing “Lawlessness and lynching are evil things"
• "but a popular belief that juries cannot be trusted is even worse.”
• Lodge argued beliefs about immigrants were enough to warrant higher barriers to immigration and that immigrants could not to be trusted
• Congress curtailed Italian immigration on racial grounds during the 1920s.
• Italian-Americans used the Columbus myth to overturn racist immigration restrictions in 1965, and for political advantage.
• Racial categories are not biological, they can be highly politicized to make myths