The most serious lynching in the history of the United States

 "THE MASCOT" cartoon, 1988 New Orleans newspaper

In the upper part of the vignette there are three images and three captions: you see people sitting on a sidewalk, described as "a nuisance for pedestrians"; a group of men sleeping in an overcrowded room, described as "their bedrooms", and finally a group of men fighting and fighting with knives and sticks, "a relaxing afternoon pastime"

The lower part of the vignette, on the other hand, contains two more crude images: one with men in a cage that two other people are lowering into the sea from a pier, and one with those that look like policemen armed with truncheons arresting Italians and them. they close in a wagon: the first image is described as "the way to get rid of them", the second as "the way to arrest them".

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Duty premise

Those who have read my interventions will perhaps remember how in the description of my beloved country, Italy, I always remember how there is no shared memory, but millions of memories that correspond to the individual opinions of every Italian citizen. Indeed, the few things that Italians agree on are altered / false facts or refer to sporting events.

The two stories I will tell you do not want to dig up ancient resentments against either the Americans or the French but make it clear under what conditions the Italians emigrated and above all that risks run my country.

The two stories I will tell you do not want to dig up ancient resentments against the Americans, nor against the French, but make it clear under what conditions the Italians emigrated and above all that risks run my country. Today in Italy there are 5 million foreign citizens with a regular residence permit, 1.5 million foreign citizens who have taken Italian citizenship. Italy is one of the richest countries in the world. It may seem unlikely to anyone, but Italian families on average are richer than German ones.

The total financial assets of Italians and non-financial companies at the end of 2017 amounted to € 4,374 billion, while that of non-financial assets (mainly real estate) was € 6.294 billion, bringing total wealth to € 10.669 billion. In particular, the net wealth of Italian families was 9,473 billion, 8 times their disposable income. According to OECD data, this ratio is higher than that for French, British and Canadian families. Housing has been the main form of household investment and, with a value of 5.246 billion euros, represented half of the gross wealth. Total household liabilities amounted to € 926 billion, a lower amount, compared to income, compared to almost all other countries (almost all concentrated for the purchase of a building).

Alas, the new right-wing government and the common vulgate tell a totally different reality: that the Italians who immigrated abroad in the past were well-liked, occupied almost uninhabited lands and were hard workers.

While they create within Italy a system based on fear, on racism, on immigrants as the cause of all Italian ills, xenophobia that has already broken out in acts of violence against foreigners. The immigrant is the one who steals the job, benefits from the social system without having contributed to building it, sells drugs, controls prostitution, ignoring Italian laws. Today, racism, xenophobia is not uncommon in Italy. There are parents who have adopted black children and are afraid that they will be confused with immigrants.

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The Italians who move to the United States, in the first part of the 19th century are a few tens of thousands. And except for a prejudice linked to the presence of the Pope and the bond that binds Christians to the latter, there are no major obstacles. There are characters like Filippo Mazzei friend of Jefferson. The majority of American institutional architecture is inspired by the works of an Italian architect: Palladio.

Things change, indeed they precipitate with the birth of the unitary state in 1861, which is built as a model of the Piedmontese monarchical state. There is harsh repression of the pockets of resistance especially in the South, the Piedmontese laws are applied throughout the kingdom and applied very high taxes to make ends meet. In the last quarter of a century over 6 million Italians emigrate and a large part of them moved to North America. Over 24 million Italians will emigrate with the complicity of the Italian authorities, who will benefit from agreements with the states in which they will emigrate. Consider that the former southern slavers needed manpower after the abolition of slavery and then drew on southern peasants with wages lower than those of colored men. Indeed in some states, the Italians were considered black men in all respects.

In particular, a lot of Sicilians arrived in New Orleans, thanks to a naval route that connected Palermo and New Orleans. Many of the people who traveled to the United States did so with the idea of working for a few years before returning to Italy from their families and this meant that for many years Italian immigrant communities were particularly closed and isolated: learning the language and integrating into American culture was not their priority. As in many other cities in the United States where Italian immigrants arrived, even in New Orleans, they settled in a neighborhood of the city that was nicknamed "Little Palermo".

On January 1, 1884, The New York Times stated in an article entitled "Our brigands" (Our Brigands): "The Italians who come to this country with hereditary respect for banditry, naturally think that America is an excellent ground for genuine Italian banditry. What is surprising is that they never thought of engaging in some other activity. The city of New York offers excellent possibilities for banditry of the genuine Italian model »

Also, the NYT in 1904 wrote this article "Exotic Time": "Under the generic name of Italians, we are receiving a truly undesirable type of population. They come from various parts of Italy and of the Mediterranean, they flee from their countries sought after by the gendarmes. These people export national characteristics and are rarely immigrants with the desire to settle down and become citizens. This country offers them better opportunities to make money than ever before, but then they spend it in Italy. Tohome many of these people were conspirators, brigands, and revolutionaries when the opportunity presented itself. They were born and bred in the atmosphere of communities involved in smuggling; the Mafia is for them what Methodism is for an American. "

In 1890 the city police chief David Hennessy was killed and the police arrested several members of the Italian community accusing them of the murder. A few months later, in 1891, a trial established the innocence of the defendants and the groundlessness of the accusations. The sentence was met with great anger by a part of the population of New Orleans, which the next day gathered to "remedy the errors of justice", as an announcement published in a local newspaper said on March 13, 1891. On March 14 about 3,000 people gathered on Canal Street and the crowd laced 11 people of Italian descent, none of whom related to the David Hennessy murder trial.

The murder and the trial

Hennessy fell victim to an ambush on October 15, 1890. After 10 hours of agony at the local hospital, he died, bringing with him the many secrets related to his adherence to the Mafia. The popular indignation immediately indicated the Italian mafia as a sure instigator of the attack, and 19 Italians were arrested, some already with precedents and others who had no relevance to the case, nor criminal inclinations. The trial, held at the beginning of 1891, concluded that the Italians had nothing to do with it: 8 defendants were acquitted and acquitted, while 11 others were held under the pretext of having to celebrate the appeal process.

The cartoon should represent an Italian mafia that intimidates the jury.

In 1905, the sociologist James E. Cutler began his book Lynch- Law:

An Investigation into the History of Lynching in the United States with

the following introduction:

"It has been said that our country’s national crime is a lynching . . . The

practice whereby mobs capture individuals suspected of a crime . . . and

execute them without any process of law . . . is to be found in no other

country of a high degree of civilization. Riots and mob executions

take place in other countries, but there is no such frequent administration of what may be termed popular justice which can properly be

compared with lynching- law procedures in the United States."

Below, a lynching cartoon, taken from the book by E. Benjamin. "History of the United States": two were hanged, the others shot dead

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Due to the alleged African ancestry of the southerners, it was even put on discussion of Italians belonging to the white race, especially in the States of the south where they were often equated with African Americans. As he wrote, a newspaper local, "when we talk about the government of the white man, the Italians are as black as the blacker than blacks in circulation "

Homer Clipper cit. in CUNNINGHAM, George E., «The Italian, a Hindrance to White Solidarity in Louisiana, 1890-1898», Journal of Negro History, 1/1965, p. 34.

Not surprisingly, in the mid-1890s

of the nineteenth century and the eve of the First World War, at least twenty-nine Sicilians were victims of lynching, a form of summary justice that was generally reserved for African Americans.

WEBB, Clive, «The Lynching of Sicilian Immigrants in the South, 1886-1910», American Nineteenth Century History, 1/2002, pp. 45-76.

Mass culture helped to spread and enhance these representations. Novels like Little Italy. A Tragedy in One Act by Horace B. Fry or The Heart of the Stranger. Christian McLeod's A Story of Little Italy,

FRY, Horace B. Little Italy. A Tragedy in One Act, New York, Russell, 1902; MCLEOD,

With the film output of Wallace McCutcheon The Black Hand in 1906 also the cinema began to give its own contribution to the presumed identity between the underworld and new arrivals from Italy. The movie, upon the organization of Italian-American criminals devoted to kidnapping, had a strong echo above all because of its claim to be inspired by a true story.

WHITE, Frank Marshall, «The Black Hand in Control in Italian New York», Outlook, 16 August 1913, p. 857.
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At the end of the nineteenth century, while the United States had taken the first steps of a journey that in a few years would have led them to become a world power starting from the victory in the Spanish-American war of 1898, the military defeat of Adua in1896 and Rome's manifest inability to realize its colonial aspirations, unlike the great European empires, they seemed to confirm the thesis of inferiority the Italians. On that occasion, the New York Times explicitly accused them of cowardice and the Chicago Daily Tribune did not hesitate to call them "rabbits" incapable even to prove themselves to the Ascari colored soldiers.

«The Triumph of Abyssinia», New York Observer and Chronicle, 26 November 1896, p. 818.
«Italy’s Hopes Brighter», New York Times, 8 Marzo 1896, p. 5; «The Battle of Adowa»,
Chicago Daily Tribune, 11 March 1896, p. 12.
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Not even one of the masters of American silent cinema, David W. Griffith, managed to escape the clichéof the Italian immigrant blackmailer, who he represented in 1914 in The Avenging Conscience
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In the characterization of the Italians, another stereotype soon joined that of the mafioso. Generally lacking previous factory experience because they came largely from the rural world, immigrants arrived in the United States from the peninsula went to swell the ranks of the urban underclass and the unskilled low-income industrial labor. Moreover, the request was strong of this kind of worker for the transformation of the production system American who, with the progressive spread of the assembly line and other initial forms of automation, had less and less need for skilled high-level workers remuneration and tended to reduce their recruitment.
However, the presence of Italians was seen as the cause of this change in the productive structure rather than as their effect. The newcomers, therefore, became the scapegoat for the growing tensions in the labor market.

WYCKOFF, Walter A., The Workers. An Experiment in Reality. The West, New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1898, p. 94.
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In the United States, especially in the South, in the twenty years between 1887 and 1907, four thousand are lynched or maybe five thousand people. 90 percent are black. Lynching is a common, rational practice (other than that crazy crowds) and serves the affirmation of white supremacy Zygmunt Bauman in his books on modernity, written in the period prior to the interest in society liquid, it had identified in modern rationality the mechanism that leads to the exclusion of entire groups humans from the possibility of living, surviving, enjoying rights. An exclusion, justifiably motivated, objectively and ultimately leads to the Holocaust.

 On March 15, 1891, The New York Times opened with an unequivocal title: "Avenged Chief Hennessy", and in the buttonhole "eleven of his assassinsItalians lynched by the crowd ". The chronicle describes in detail "an uprising of indignant citizens in New Orleans", cites names and surnames of the attackers, which they were never subjected to judgment.

The case was not isolated, he repeated from Tallulah to Erwin.

The words spoken in the streets of New Orleans before the massacre by Mr. Parkerson, local political leader, one of the most prominent lawyers in the city standing at the head of the assault, they show us today the choice between the juridical civilization and the barbarity of the alleged private justice:"Citizens of New Orleans, you must choose whether the city is regulated by an ordinary government or by organized assassins. Today you have to choose whether to be governed by the laws you choose or by the edicts of the Mafia...Men living in a civilized and organized community, finding their own ineffective laws, are forced to protect themselves. What insurance has been left to us when the police chief is murdered by the Mafia and his killers are free in the community again? every man here will follow me and see the murder of Hennessy vindicated. "

I believe that this speech or a very similar one will soon be heard on Italian radio or television.