Italians who settled in the Deep South were sometimes made to attend black schools. At first, it was by no means clear that they would be allowed to use white drinking fountains and lavatories. Other immigrant groups—Greeks, Turks, Poles, Slavs, Jews of every nation—encountered similar prejudice, of course, and for Asians and America’s own blacks prejudice and restrictions were even more imaginatively cruel, but the Italians were widely regarded as something of a special case—more voluble and temperamental and troublesome than other ethnic groups.
