How Lynching Led to the Creation of Columbus Day

By Jerry Urso, FPS- LifeHistorian, James Weldon Johnson Branch of ASALH

Racial Terror and the Problem of the “In-Between” People

In the closing decades of the nineteenth century, the United States was struggling to stabilize a racial order reshaped by emancipation, Reconstruction, and the violent reassertion of white supremacy. Nowhere was this struggle more pronounced than in the South, where Jim Crow law and custom enforced a rigid racial binary. One was either White, entitled to protection, citizenship, and legal recognition, or Black, subject to segregation, economic exploitation, and terror. This system required clarity to function. Ambiguity was dangerous.

It was into this fragile structure that hundreds of thousands of Italian immigrants arrived, particularly Southern Italians and Sicilians whose poverty, Catholicism, and appearance marked them as suspect. Between 1880 and 1921, historians have documented at least fifty lynchings of Italian Americans in the United States, making Italians the most frequently lynched European immigrant group in American history [1]. Although African Americans were overwhelmingly the primary victims of lynching, Italians occupied a uniquely perilous position. They were European, yet not fully accepted as white. They were Christian, yet Catholic in a Protestant nation. They labored in spaces associated with Blackness and poverty, often alongside African Americans, and in doing so exposed the fragility of racial hierarchy itself.

This ambiguity provoked anxiety. If Europeans could be treated as Black laborers, then race was revealed not as biological destiny, but as enforced social rank. Southern newspapers, politicians, and civic leaders increasingly described Italians as violent, clannish, and racially inferior. Language became a weapon. Slurs such as “dago,” “Dago Joe,” and “Dago Jim” were not casual epithets. They were racial classifications, linguistic tools that positioned Italians within the logic of Jim Crow even when statutes had not yet done so [2].

Lynching, in this context, functioned as racial instruction. It taught Italians where they stood and what would happen if they crossed the color line. These acts of violence were rarely responses to proven crimes. They were mechanisms for enforcing racial boundaries and preserving white supremacy as a social system rather than a biological fact.

Italians as Replacement Labor and the Southern Backlash

The targeting of Italians intensified as African Americans began leaving plantations during the early stages of the Great Migration. For Southern planters, Black mobility represented an existential threat. Cotton agriculture depended upon a captive labor force, and the departure of Black workers undermined the economic foundation of the post-Reconstruction South.

Planters responded by recruiting Italian peasants, particularly from Sicily, through labor agents and contracts. These immigrants were promised land ownership, independence, and opportunity. In reality, many found themselves trapped in systems of debt peonage that closely resembled the coercive conditions African Americans were fleeing [3].

Italians worked the same cotton fields, lived in the same shacks, and endured similar exploitation. Their European origin, however, destabilized the racial logic of the plantation system. Italians did not behave as planters expected. They resisted discipline, asserted contractual rights, and formed social and economic relationships with African Americans that violated white norms.

Southern newspapers amplified white resentment. Italians were portrayed as dangerous foreigners, prone to criminality and incapable of self-government. Crimes involving Italians were sensationalized, while violence against them was framed as understandable or even necessary. When Italians opened small grocery stores that served Black customers, allowing African Americans to bypass plantation stores and debt systems, they were accused of threatening both racial and economic order [4].

Mob violence followed predictably. Italians were punished not because they failed as laborers, but because they refused to remain racially subordinate. Replacement did not mean equality. It meant conditional tolerance, enforceable through terror.

Case Studies in Racial EnforcementTallulah, Louisiana (1899)

In July 1899, racial terror erupted in Tallulah, Louisiana, when five Italian immigrants—Antonio and Carlo Masso, Giovanni and Giuseppe Defatta, and Andrea Marchesi—were lynched by a white mob. The men were grocery merchants whose businesses served both Black and white customers. Newspapers minimized the violence, claiming it stemmed from a dispute involving a goat. The triviality of the alleged cause masked the true motivation.

By selling goods to African Americans, the Italian merchants undermined the plantation store system that enforced Black economic dependency. Their success represented a direct challenge to white control. The lynching was public and brutal. The men’s bodies were left on display, a warning to others who might attempt similar independence. No one was prosecuted. The message was unmistakable: Italians who interfered with racial and economic hierarchy would be destroyed [5].

Erwin, Mississippi (1901)

In Erwin, Mississippi, Italians had been imported explicitly to replace African Americans leaving plantation labor. Among them was Giuseppe Polizzi, whose lynching in 1901 followed escalating tension between Italian workers and white planters. Polizzi’s death was not the result of a proven crime. It was a demonstration of authority.

Italian laborers resisted planter discipline and refused to accept racial subordination. Their European origin complicated Jim Crow logic, particularly when Italians worked and lived alongside Black laborers. Polizzi’s lynching restored clarity through violence. It reminded Italians that whiteness was conditional and that proximity to Blackness carried lethal consequences [6].

Walsenburg, Colorado (1895)

Anti-Italian violence was not confined to the South. In Walsenburg, Colorado, five Italian men—Giuseppe Morello, Angelo Diena, Giovanni Rossi, Luigi Casale, and Antonio Valente—were lynched after being accused of murdering a saloon keeper. They were denied trial. Their ethnicity itself was treated as evidence of guilt.

Newspapers depicted the men as inherently violent, reinforcing national stereotypes that framed Italians as racially inferior and unassimilable. Walsenburg demonstrates that Italians’ racial vulnerability was national, not regional. Even outside Jim Crow law, Italians could be stripped of legal protection when public sentiment defined them as outsiders [7].

Tampa, Florida (1910)

In Tampa, Florida, Castenego Ficarrotta and Angelo Albano were lynched in 1910 during labor unrest in the cigar industry. Tampa’s workforce was multiracial and multilingual, with Italians, Cubans, Spaniards, and African Americans working closely together. This proximity fostered labor organizing and solidarity that alarmed industrial elites.

Ficarrotta and Albano were removed from jail by a mob and lynched in a swamp outside the city. The killings were framed as restoring order. In reality, they were warnings against labor organizing and interracial cooperation. As elsewhere, no meaningful prosecutions followed [8].

The New Orleans Massacre and International Consequences

The most infamous act of anti-Italian violence occurred on March 14, 1891, in New Orleans. After Police Chief David Hennessy was murdered, suspicion fell on Italian residents. Nineteen men were indicted, and nine went to trial. When the jury failed to convict due to lack of evidence, a mob of approximately ten thousand people stormed the parish prison and lynched eleven Italian men [9].

The massacre shocked the international community. Italy recalled its ambassador, severed diplomatic relations, and formally protested the killings as an attack on Italian nationals. Italian newspapers demanded justice, and public outrage was intense.

This crisis mattered because Italy was not powerless. By the 1890s, Italy possessed a modern navy widely regarded at the time as among the stronger naval forces of the world. While not equal to Britain or France, it was formidable enough to command respect. American leaders understood that ignoring Italy risked international humiliation and escalation [10].

Southern authorities refused to prosecute the lynchers. Federal intervention would have required confronting white supremacy directly. Instead, Washington chose appeasement.

From Mob Violence to Judicial Lynching: Sacco and Vanzetti

The racial logic that enabled lynching in the South did not disappear in the North. It evolved into institutional form.

In Massachusetts, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were arrested in 1920 and executed in 1927. Though often remembered solely as radicals, their Italianness shaped every stage of their prosecution. Newspapers emphasized their ethnicity, accents, and supposed racial temperament. Courtroom testimony framed them as inherently dangerous foreigners.

Despite international protests, credible doubts about their guilt, and later acknowledgments of injustice, Sacco and Vanzetti were executed. Their deaths represent judicial lynching, where the machinery of the state replaced the mob. Boston offered a courtroom instead of a rope, but the underlying assumption remained the same: Italian lives were expendable in defense of social order [11].

Columbus Day as Racial and Diplomatic Appeasement

Faced with international pressure after New Orleans, the federal government sought a symbolic solution that avoided accountability. In 1892, President Benjamin Harrison issued a proclamation calling for a national observance honoring Christopher Columbus.

This act was strategic. Columbus provided a usable symbol of European civilization and Catholic respectability. Elevating him reframed Italians as founders rather than threats. Columbus Day reassured the Italian Republic, calmed Italian Americans, and accelerated Italians’ absorption into whiteness.

African Americans endured thousands of lynchings without such recognition. The difference was not suffering. It was leverage. Italy had diplomatic power, international press influence, and a navy. African Americans had none.

Columbus Day was not born from celebration. It was born from racial terror, international pressure, and political calculation. It stands as evidence that justice in America has often been determined not by morality, but by cost.

Sources

[1] Brundage, W. Fitzhugh, Lynching in the New South, University of Illinois Press[2] Jacobson, Matthew Frye, Whiteness of a Different Color, Harvard University Press[3] Daniel, Pete, The Shadow of Slavery, University of Illinois Press[4] Higham, John, Strangers in the Land, Rutgers University Press[5] Gambino, Richard, Vendetta, Doubleday[6] Guglielmo, Thomas A., White on Arrival, Oxford University Press[7] Pfaelzer, Jean, Driven Out, Random House[8] Green, Paul E., The Lynching of Italians in Tampa, Florida Historical Quarterly[9] United States State Department, diplomatic correspondence on the 1891 New Orleans lynching[10] Bosworth, R.J.B., Italy and the Wider World, Routledge[11] Frankfurter, Felix, The Case of Sacco and Vanzetti, Atlantic Monthly Press