The story of Columbus Day was written with the blood of  Italian immigrants who were savagely lynched in 1891.

It was a story we never learned in our history books, but it is a very American one.

The history of the celebration of Columbus Day has its roots in America’s hateful xenophobia at a time when Italians were considered criminals, murderers, and the worst of the worst.

How many of us who march in Columbus Day parades are aware of how the holiday came about or that President Benjamin Harrison proclaimed it as a one-time national celebration in 1892 – in the wake of a savage New Orleans lynching that took the lives of 11 Italian immigrants. The presidential proclamation was part of a broader attempt to quiet outrage among Italian-Americans, and a diplomatic blowup over the murders that almost brought Italy and the United States to the brink of war.

Just how did an incident of xenophobic violence get transformed by Uncle Sam into a day of American nationalistic fanfare?

It is a chilling story worth remembering and learning from in our age of ICE.

How White is White?

The federal holiday honoring the Italian explorer Christopher Columbus  was central to the process through which Italian-Americans were fully accepted as white during the 20th century.

During the 19th and early 20th century, Italians were near the bottom rung in American Society.

The story of how Italian immigrants went from racial pariah status in the 19th century to white Americans in good standing in the 20th century offers a window into the peculiar alchemy through which race is constructed in the U.S. and how racial hierarchies can sometimes change.

Southern Italians, along with other Southern Europeans, North Africans, and Eastern Europeans, were viewed by many white Protestant Europeans as an inferior race. These waves of culturally diverse immigrants from all over Europe changed the face of the country.

The surge of newcomers created a national panic and led Americans to adopt a more restricted, politicized view of how whiteness was to be allocated. Journalists, politicians, social scientists, and immigration officials embraced the habit of separating Europeans into “races.”

Just who could be considered “white?”

Some were designated whiter and more worthy of citizenship than others, while some were ranked as too close to blackness to be socially redeemable.

Darker-skinned southern Italians endured the penalties of blackness on both sides of the Atlantic In Italy  Northerners had long held that Southerners-particularly Sicilians were an “uncivilized and racially inferior people” too obviously African to be part of Europe.

Anti-Italian cartoon by Louis Dalrymple depicting Italian immigrants as rats carrying mafia, socialism and anarchy. Published on Judge magazine, 1903

That racist dogma about Southern Italians found fertile soil in the U.S.

The newcomers encountered waves of books, magazines, and newspapers that bombarded Americans with images of Italians as racially suspect. They were sometimes shut out of movies, schools, and labor unions or assigned to church pews set aside for black people.

They were described in the press as “swarthy” members of a criminal race and derided in the streets with names like dago or guinea and nigger wop.

In a N.Y. Times 1882 editorial that appeared under the headline “Our Future Citizens,” the editors wrote:

“There has never been since New York was founded so low and ignorant a class among the immigrants who poured in here as the Southern Italians who have been crowding our docks during the past year.”

Immigration

Between 1880 and 1920, some four million Italian immigrants left impoverished towns throughout southern Italy to seek a better life for their families in the U.S. Upon their arrival in America, they were subjected to violence and hostility unlike anything they had experienced in Italy.

Many of these immigrants arrived through the port of New Orleans to provide cheap labor needed in the sugar cane fields. They took the place of emancipated slaves. Many lived and socialized in the black communities.

In time, this proximity to blackness would lead white Southerners to view Sicilians, in particular, as not fully white and to see them as eligible for persecution — including lynching — that had customarily been reserved for African-Americans.

After Hennessy was killed, 19 Italian residents were in custody awaiting trial. None of the prisoners had been found guilty when the mob descended on the jail. Image: The Historic New Orleans Collection

One of the worst episodes of racial violence in our country’s history occurred in New Orleans due to an incident that occurred on the evening of October 15, 1891, when the city’s police chief, David Hennessy, was shot. As he lay dying in a dark street, when asked who shot him, he allegedly said, “The Dagos.”

New Orleans mayor Joseph A. Shakspeare gave a speech that declared Hennessy a “victim of Sicilian Vengeance.”

The mayor ordered them “to arrest every Italian you come across if necessary.”

Some 200 Italian immigrants were taken into custody, and nine of them were tried before a jury. None were found guilty. Despite that finding, they were all returned to jail.

Political and business leaders in the community inflamed the already deep-seated anti-Italian immigrant sentiment that existed in New Orleans.

The continued spread of misinformation and harmful stereotypes by newspapers and politicians soon led to a demonstration of extreme violence outside Parish Prison, where the 19 Sicilian and Italian men charged with the murder were being held.

On March 14, 1891, an angry mob in excess of 5,000 gathered outside the prison. They stormed the prison and dragged the Sicilian men outside. Several of the victims were repeatedly shot and several others were hanged, their bodies grossly put on display in the aftermath. Eleven men were lynched while the rest of the people in the prison managed to hide or escape.

None of the men who were lynched were found guilty of being involved in Hennessy’s murder.

This was the largest mob to ever participate in a mass lynching in American history. Yet you will not read a single word about it in any of our school’s history books.

Only The Best People

Song sheet about the 1899 lynching of Italians in Tallulah.

To fully understand how despised the immigrants were, the New York Times and many other newspapers throughout the country actually applauded the lynchings in their editorials. Future president Teddy Roosevelt stated that the lynchings “were a rather good thing.”

The New York Times reported that the mob had consisted “mostly of the best element” of New Orleans society. The following day, a Times editorial justified the lynching — and dehumanized the dead, with by-now-familiar racist stereotypes.

“These sneaking and cowardly Sicilians,” the editors wrote, “the descendants of bandits and assassins, who have transported to this country the lawless passions, the cutthroat practices … are to us a pest without mitigations. Our own rattlesnakes are as good citizens as they. Our own murderers are men of feeling and nobility compared to them.”

President Harrison

President Benjamin Harrison would have ignored the New Orleans carnage had the victims been black.

But the Italian government of the newly formed Kingdom of Italy made that impossible.

The violent lynching strained international relations between the U.S. and the Italian government. Italy broke off diplomatic relations and removed its U.S. ambassador from Washington, D.C., demanding action.

To appease the Italian government and to gain the vote of Italian Americans in an election year, President Benjamin Harrison proclaimed the first nationally recognized Columbus Day celebration to be a one-time celebration on October 21, 1892.

The 77 foot monument in the center of Columbus Circle in NY is tooled with a 13 foot sculpture of Columbus. Baron Fava having returned to his Ambassadorship after the 1891 conflict delivered a speech at its unveiling on Americas first official Columbus Day. Picture Library of Congress.

Political gain was not the only motivation behind the proclamation.

Harrison’s proclamation did not mention Italy or Italian immigrants. Instead, American citizens were encouraged to observe the anniversary of “the discovery of America … as shall impress upon our youth the patriotic duties of American citizenship.”

First Columbus Day Parade, NYC Union Square

Columbus Day was created to fuel the assimilation of Italian Americans. From that day to this, Columbus, who was regarded as a national hero of Italian heritage, was embraced by Italian immigrants as a symbol that they would someday be accepted in America.

Harrison’s Columbus Day proclamation in 1892 opened the door for Italian-Americans to write themselves into the American origin story, in a fashion that piled myth upon myth.

The proclamation of Columbus Day was never meant to honor the victims of the 1891 mass lynching. It is no accident that young children are taught in school to celebrate Columbus, a pillar of white supremacy and violent imperialism, yet there is no mention of the anti-immigrant violence and ethnic profiling of law enforcement that lead to the lynching of 11 men for a crime they did not commit.

In an of Age of ICE, We Are All a Nation of Immigrants

ICE Recruiting Poster 2025 and Illustration of rioters breaking into Parish prison, during the 1891 lynchings in New Orleans

Our collective memories dissolve like a Polaroid snapshot without any sense of awareness of the discrimination our own ancestors may have been exposed to.

I would hope that when Italian Americans hear Trump rail against the current wave of immigrants, they would have a cultural remembrance that the way he portrays South and Central Americans is the same way their grandparents were portrayed.  

In the great American Amnesia we often suffer from, anyone who arrives after our family is vile, dirty, prone to criminality, destined to be a burden to the nation, and is simply unworthy of becoming an American.

And if the 1891 mass lynching of Sicilian and Italian men is to be remembered, let it be a reminder of anti-immigrant violence, ethnic profiling by law enforcement, and the lynching of people for crimes they did not commit.

We do not need to look back to see how the spread of misinformation and harmful stereotypes creates violence.

We need only to watch the news.