Dixie's Italians by Jessica Barbata Jackson

Author:Jessica Barbata Jackson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: LSU Press
Published: 2020-05-14T16:00:00+00:00

The Rollins v. State case from 1921 in Alabama presents the most infamous example of this liminal space and how Sicilians and other Italians complicated Jim Crow miscegenation laws.76 Edith Labue was married to a Sicilian man named Joe Labue, who worked as a taxicab driver, a mechanic, or a musician, depending on the record consulted.77 Joe Labue left Birmingham on June 24, 1918, after being drafted into the army during World War I. He returned on January 27, 1919, to find his wife roughly six or seven months pregnant; Edith gave birth, according to her husband, “in April some time, 1919.”78 In the employ of Edith Labue’s father-in-law was “a negro or descendant of a negro” by the name of Jim Rollins; the Labues’ next door neighbor reported seeing Rollins bringing food to the family from time to time.

On the evening of February 11, 1921, Birmingham City Police arrived at the Labue home; without warning, they “kicked open the door” and “busted” inside. There in the kitchen, toward the back of the house, the detectives’ flashlights cut through the darkness; joltingly, their beams halted when they landed on the mildly bewildered, somewhat expectant countenances of Jim Rollins and Edith Labue, standing “face to face.” While they were both dressed, detectives reported, “there was no light in the room . . . they were in the room alone . . . and it was dark.” Why did the police enter and search the Labue home that evening? Given how the ensuing trial played out, Joe Labue likely reported his suspicions regarding his wife to the police, thus leading them to investigate.

As a result, on March 21, 1921, Rollins was indicted on the charge that he and Edith Labue, “a white person . . . did intermarry or live in adultery or fornication with each other, against the peace and dignity of the State of Alabama.” At the ensuing trial, Birmingham City Detective H. H. Sullivan reported that Rollins had confessed while in custody:

He stated to me that in July or August of 1918 he had had intercourse with this woman Edith Labue; that about three weeks after this she called him to her home and told him there was something wrong, and wanted to know what to do about it, and he said he didn’t know what to do, and after the child was born he said she called him over there and showed him the child and asked him what he was going to do about it. . . . He said he had had illicit intercourse with this woman. I talked to him about whether he had had intercourse with this woman on other occasions. He said he had. He said he had been about once a month; he said sometimes he would go every two or three months . . . From July or August, 1918 up until the time that he was arrested and placed in custody.

Despite Sullivan’s testimony, Rollins’s defense attorney asserted that Sullivan’s partner,

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