A Great Conspiracy Against Our Race by Peter G. Vellon

Author:Peter G. Vellon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: NYU Press
Published: 2014-07-21T16:00:00+00:00

Lynching of Angelo Albano and Castenge Ficarrotta in Tampa, Florida, 1910. Department of Special Collections, University of South Florida.

As it had done historically, the Italian language mainstream press was quick to defend Italian immigrants murdered at the hands of white mobs. In their coverage of Italian lynching, mainstream newspapers often relied upon the pernicious legacy of African American enslavement to provide an appropriate model to express their outrage and disappointment in American civilization. For example, in 1896, after the lynching of five Italians in Louisiana, Il Progresso blamed an environment of mob violence, comparing it to the institutionalized violence wielded to maintain slavery before the Civil War.26 “Civilized America” was described in disappointed terms as “nothing more than a colossal hypocrisy where former slave owners have one hand on the Constitution and the other gripping the lash used to whip black slaves.”27 In their condemnation of American “barbarism,” Italian American newspapers neatly linked Italian immigrants with African Americans: innocent victims of American outlaw justice. Across the Atlantic, Italian newspapers viewed the lynchings within the context of the United States’ regrettable history with race. “Especially in New Orleans,” lamented Il Secolo, “where there live the descendants of slave traders and slavery, the ferocious acts that occurred during the grand war of secession continue to happen.” Il Diritto maintained that the “ideology of reactionaries was still prevalent in the secessionist South even after the Civil War…. it is a shame that a great war was fought to abolish slavery, a war that we admired them for, and yet it did not mean anything. They went to war against human slavery and [now] they let their own citizens commit crimes such as this.”28

Similarly, African American newspapers saw the kind of mob violence perpetrated upon southern Italians as something that affected the African American community as well. The Leavenworth (KS) Advocate wrote in 1891 that “mob violence if carried on in that shape will ultimately undermine our institutions…. Every citizen regardless of nationality should protest against mobs, it matters not where they occur, nor what the cause.” After the lynching of three Italian immigrants in Hahnville, Louisiana, in 1896, the African American Richmond Planet editorialized that “we are opposed to the lynching of white men or colored ones, no matter how heinous the crime committed. Such barbarous practices have no place in civilized communities.”29

The acknowledgment of a common enemy found credibility within the African American community and reflected a larger dialogue between African American newspapers and the Italian language press. After the New Orleans lynching in 1891, a headline in the New York Age asked, “Is the White South Civilized?” In its condemnation of the South, and especially the people who perpetrated the crime, the paper recounted in outrage the lynching of the “defenseless” Italians. According to the Age, “As defenseless as they were, under the protection of lawful authority, and easily to have been protected by fifty men, they were murdered by the ‘the best citizens’” while the police looked on.30 After the

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