Lynched in America: An Immigrant Population Persecuted
Americans were lynched in the United States before, during and after the early 1900s.
Not once. Not in one city. Not during one flash of mob insanity.
Documented cases involving Italians stretch across at least nine states between 1880 and 1921. Louisiana. Florida. Mississippi. Kentucky. Colorado. Illinois. New York. Arizona. Washington.
New Orleans in 1891 remains the match-point event.
Police Chief David Hennessy was shot on October 15, 1890. He died the next morning. The investigation quickly focused on Italians and Sicilians. Nineteen men were indicted.
The trial produced six acquittals and three mistrials.
The city did not accept the answer.
On March 14, 1891, a crowd numbering in the thousands entered the parish prison and murdered eleven Italians. Some had been acquitted. Others had not been tried.
They were already inside a government jail. Some were chained. Others waited in holding cells.
The mob did not hunt fugitives. It invaded a public prison and killed men the government controlled.
This was not simply prejudice boiling over. Political power, sensational reporting and commercial interests around the waterfront fed the anger. Dock labor, stevedore contracts, fruit importing, patronage and voting strength all sat behind the public story.
Then came the master accusation.
“Mafia.”
“Vendetta.”
“Secret society.”
“Criminal class.”
A murder investigation became an ethnic prosecution. If the defendants were convicted, the conspiracy was exposed. If acquitted, the conspiracy must control the jury. If evidence failed, that proved how powerful the organization was.
The accusation had no exit.
The pattern became brutally simple:
Accusation. Ethnic roundup. Sensational reporting. Unacceptable verdict. Public mobilization. Jail invasion. Murder.
Dead defendants do not testify.
New Orleans was not alone. Five Italians were lynched in Walsenburg, Colorado, in 1895. In Tallulah, Louisiana, all the Italians living in the community were lynched in 1899. Castenego Ficarrotta and Angelo Albano were handcuffed together and hanged near Tampa in 1910. Paulo Boleta appears in the documented history of Italians lynched in New York in 1916.
The violence did not stay in the South. It did not end with the nineteenth century.
It also did not always require murder. Threats, attempted lynchings and forced departures could remove an ethnic population just as effectively.
Then comes the material question.
Who benefited?
Who obtained the abandoned homes, stores, farms, contracts and customers? Who gained control after immigrants were killed or driven away?
Italian immigrants could be white on paper and still unsafe in practice. A census category might call a man white. Naturalization might recognize him as American. A mob could assign him an entirely different place.
The known count of at least 50 documented cases is a floor, not a final number. Old newspapers often buried this violence under phrases such as “mob justice,” “vigilance” or “vengeance.” Names were misspelled. Ethnicity disappeared. Some cases survived only in consular dispatches, Catholic archives or Italian-language newspapers.
New Orleans formally apologized in 2019.
It took 128 years.
The angry mob needed one day.
Sources & Further Reading
- https://www.loc.gov/resource/gdcwdl.wdl_04013/
- https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1891/d677
- https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1892/d256
- https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/proclamation-335-400th-anniversary-the-discovery-america-columbus
- https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-the-gilded-age-and-progressive-era/article/lynching-across-international-borders-the-italian-government-and-the-1891-lynching-in-new-orleans/29C91BCE9A9E18BE6A11706A159A5D73
- https://64parishes.org/entry/new-orleans-lynching-of-1891
- https://www.nps.gov/people/david-hennessy.htm
- https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/italians-lynched-new-orleans/
- https://orderisda.org/culture/stories/the-lynching-of-italians-and-the-rise-of-anti-italianism-in-america/
- https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/1891-new-orleans-lynching-eleven-italians-180962853/
- https://www.nola.com/news/article_4a29dc3e-593a-11e9-aea5-37a53dd926c1.html
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