Dixie's Italians Quotes

“On April 12, 2019, New Orleans mayor LaToya Cantrell issued a formal apology for the lynching of the eleven Italians in New Orleans in 1891. The scene—Italian and American flags in view behind the podium where Cantrell spoke, the performance of both the American and Italian national anthems alongside a memorial wall dedicated to notable Louisiana Italians—bore little resemblance to the decades when Italians were considered a “colony of vicious murderers and assassins” and “degenerate monsters.”
― Jessica Barbata Jackson, Dixie’s Italians: Sicilians, Race, and Citizenship in the Jim Crow Gulf South

“Because the United States did not have a naturalization treaty with Italy, the Italian government maintained that if a citizen left the “fatherland” without having performed military service, he and his male children would still be subject to compulsory military duty.36 Policies began to shift by 1915, as the Italian government made moves to “disclaim” children born to Italian parents in the United States, but it did not formally end its policy of conscripting emigrated Italians until 1929.37”
― Jessica Barbata Jackson, Dixie’s Italians: Sicilians, Race, and Citizenship in the Jim Crow Gulf South

“In 1910, Senator Leroy Percy of Mississippi and Representative John L. Burnett of Alabama signed the majority report of the Immigration Commission that recommended the literacy test.20 Having been defeated by a presidential veto in 1897, when the literacy test came up for debate in Congress again in 1913, the proposal received limited southern opposition; only two southern senators dissented, and the southern representatives in the House voted to support the bill sixty-eight to five.”
― Jessica Barbata Jackson, Dixie’s Italians: Sicilians, Race, and Citizenship in the Jim Crow Gulf South

“The Louisiana legislature revised its civil code in 1825 to outlaw the legitimization of biracial children by white fathers.”
― Jessica Barbata Jackson, Dixie’s Italians: Sicilians, Race, and Citizenship in the Jim Crow Gulf South

“In both rural Bolivar County and Lamar County, local native-born, white community members attempted to exclude Italian children from local schools on the racial premise that Italian schoolchildren were not “white” enough.”
― Jessica Barbata Jackson, Dixie’s Italians: Sicilians, Race, and Citizenship in the Jim Crow Gulf South

“Sumrall, Shelby, and Hattiesburg marked turning points in the Gulf South’s reception of immigrants. While southern states had previously promoted the arrival of immigrants and their labor, heightened class tensions compelled employers to dispense with Italians in order to appease the white, native-born Mississippian labor force.”
― Jessica Barbata Jackson, Dixie’s Italians: Sicilians, Race, and Citizenship in the Jim Crow Gulf South

“Disregarding the potential international implications, the Hattiesburg Daily News articulated the localized racial precept: “There is no objection to the decent Italian, nor to the foreigner from any other shore, but the line is drawn on the Dago.”69 Even if the Italian schoolchildren were technically white, they were still “dagoes.” This discernment, occasioned by mapping a class status onto Italian families or differentiating between and hierarchically ordering Italians above Sicilians—merely a discursive means to justifiably exclude some—reminded the community that “dagoes” and Italians were not the same brand of immigrant. Notwithstanding the distinction, Fletcher did not suggest that the Italian students should attend the region’s black school. Marking the Italians in Sumrall as racially “other” did not mean that native-born, white Mississippians regarded Italians as a third race, and, unlike the Chinese in Mississippi, Italians were not “other” enough to be dispatched into the “colored” or black community. Instead, following the attorney general’s ruling, the Italian children returned to school, where they were given “instructions along with the white pupils” through the end of the school week.70”
― Jessica Barbata Jackson, Dixie’s Italians: Sicilians, Race, and Citizenship in the Jim Crow Gulf South

“October of 1907, “a race question with unusual features” surfaced in Sumrall, and “it is feared that there will be serious consequences.”54 The “ugly manifestation of race prejudice” that had emerged, upon which this chapter began, involved ten Italian families—with twenty-five children of school age among them—employed at the Newman Lumber Company.55 When the children of Charlie Frier, Joseph and Josephine, enrolled in Sumrall’s local, white school, the town’s native-born residents fumed in response to the Italian “insiste[nce on] attending the public white schools.”56 Local commentary mirrored the prior year’s deliberations regarding where Italian children should attend school in Shelby and employed a fervent anti-Italian rhetoric comparable with Governor Vardaman’s antiblack claims that black education would lead to “rapes and murders.” According to the Hattiesburg Daily News, the Italians working in the Sumrall sawmills were “lower than the negroes—that they tried to associate with the negroes and were snubbed. . . . The [Italian] children were not . . . fit to sit in school with the white children.”57 The native-born white community in Sumrall, recent migrants to the region themselves, defined themselves as the rightful “native” residents and identified the Italian families in question as visiting interlopers and outsiders. The press referred to the dispute between the white community and the Italians as “racial,” which, resembling the case in Shelby, indicated that the Italians fell outside the category of whiteness. In response to the uproar, Principal Harbert removed the Italian schoolchildren from their classes, suspended them indefinitely, and dispatched them to their homes.”
― Jessica Barbata Jackson, Dixie’s Italians: Sicilians, Race, and Citizenship in the Jim Crow Gulf South

“In the fall of 1906, just after the school year had begun, the parents of native-born, white children in Shelby, Mississippi—deep in the northwest Delta region of the state along the Arkansas border—submitted a complaint to the Bolivar County School Board: “Are Italian children entitled to admission to the white public schools?”44 The request for removing Italian children from the white school and establishing separate schools for the “Caucasian race” and the “Italian race” offered several rationales. First, there were enough Italian children in the community to warrant a separate school, and the “clannishness” of the Italian community would welcome the division. Next, Italian children were “not on the same footing as those of Anglo-Saxon birth, according to the laws of ethuology [sic] as well as public education.” Along those same lines, the request stated that the children of “pauper” Italians were “not desirable companions” and were “unfit” to associate with Shelby’s white children.45 Furthermore, the Italians in the community “do not make good citizens but are almost without exception criminals” and “content to live in dives and hovels and find associates among the negroes of the lowest class.”46 Citing Italian impoverishment and their predisposition to criminal delinquency, the native-born white community located Italians outside the “Caucasian race” and in opposition to “Anglo-Saxon-ness.”
― Jessica Barbata Jackson, Dixie’s Italians: Sicilians, Race, and Citizenship in the Jim Crow Gulf South

“Ultimately, southerners only engaged in two sustained efforts to remove Sicilians and other Italians from white schools, both in rural Mississippi: in 1907 in Lamar County, upon which this chapter began, and in 1906 in Bolivar County.”
― Jessica Barbata Jackson, Dixie’s Italians: Sicilians, Race, and Citizenship in the Jim Crow Gulf South

“In 1900, 845 Italian-born immigrants lived in Mississippi, a population that nearly tripled to 2,137 by 1910.35 These increasing numbers still represented only a small minority across the state—Italians made up 10 percent of the foreign-born white population in 1900 and 22 percent in 1910.36 And yet, Mississippi’s school disputes both took place in counties with an uncharacteristically and disproportionately large number of Italians: Italians comprised 72 percent of foreign-born whites in Bolivar County and 46 percent in Lamar County.37 Within Mississippi’s racial landscape, where did “inbetween” Sicilians and other Italians reside? More specifically, with the implementation of a binary educational system, where did”
― Jessica Barbata Jackson, Dixie’s Italians: Sicilians, Race, and Citizenship in the Jim Crow Gulf South

“about 1,200 Chinese immigrants had settled in the Mississippi Delta by 1870.13 According to white Mississippians, these immigrants were neither white nor black; instead, white Mississippians considered the Chinese to possess a “roughly Negro” or “near-Negro” status.14 Though not exactly a “third race,” Chinese coolies challenged the dualism of the South, as Jim Crow laws made no provisions for the “partly colored” or the “almost white.”15 In 1924 Rosedale, Mississippi, for instance, the local white school excluded Martha Lum, a nine-year-old Chinese American, from attending.16 While the Mississippi Circuit Court initially ruled in favor of Lum, the Mississippi Supreme Court reversed the decision, claiming that the Chinese were “not white . . . they must fall under the heading ‘colored races.’”17 Upon appeal, the US Supreme Court sustained the state’s ruling in Gong Lum v. Rice (1927). Since Lum was a member of the “Mongolian or yellow race” and Mississippi’s policy was intended to “preserve the white schools for members of the Caucasian race,” Lum was “not entitled to attend the white public school.”18 The court did invite Lum to attend the local “colored” school—meaning that a student who was not “white” could be “colored” by default—and established the precedent that barring Chinese children from attending white schools did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment.19 While convention placed the Delta Chinese within a “tri-part” racial structure—neither white nor necessarily “Negro”—because segregation did not make space for gradations, Jim Crow legislation relegated the Chinese in the South to the legal status of nonwhite.20 Of course, the Chinese and Italians in Mississippi occupied distinct racial trajectories—southerners would ultimately categorize Chinese in the South as nonwhite, whereas groups like Italians eventually gained access to white identification. Still, since Jim Crow segregation was officially codified without in-between spaces within the binary caste system of segregation law, such racial ambiguity confused boundaries, redefined both whiteness and blackness, and ultimately meant that those constructed as nonwhite”
― Jessica Barbata Jackson, Dixie’s Italians: Sicilians, Race, and Citizenship in the Jim Crow Gulf South

“Longino’s gubernatorial successor, James Vardaman (1904–1908), felt differently; known as the “Great White Chief,” he espoused a particular brand of white supremacy. With the federal sanction of the 1899 Supreme Court case Cumming v. Richmond County Board of Education, which gave states control over determining the parameters of “separate but equal education,” Vardaman continued the charge to defund black schools in Mississippi.25 Vardaman told the Mississippi legislature in 1906 that he wanted to stop funding black schools because black education would result in “rapes and murders, which precipitated the unpleasantries of hangings and burnings . . . [and] ultimately undermined one of the primary reasons for preserving racial segregation: to prevent social equality and miscegenation.”
― Jessica Barbata Jackson, Dixie’s Italians: Sicilians, Race, and Citizenship in the Jim Crow Gulf South

“Before 1870, there was no public education system in Mississippi. The state’s 1868 Reconstruction-era constitutional convention defeated contradictory proposals: to institute a statewide integrated school system and to require that schools be segregated. Short on details, the convention ordered state legislators to develop a statewide education system.8 By 1875, Democrats had reclaimed control over the state and imposed a new constitution that disenfranchised the state’s African American population by imposing a literacy requirement for voting, along with complicating the guidelines for residency and voter registration.9 Consequently, in 1878, legislators rewrote the state’s education law in order to codify segregation into Mississippi’s public school system: “The schools in each county shall be so arranged as to offer ample free school facilities to all educable youths in that county but white and colored children shall not be taught in the same school-house, but in separate school-houses.”10 The new law imposed geographic parameters requiring black and white schools to be established at least two and a half miles apart and additionally gave the county superintendent the sole power to certify teachers.11 Revising their 1868 constitution into the version that still remains in place today, Mississippi legislators in 1890 crafted the new education law into the state’s constitution and formalized a constitutional mandate for a segregated public education system: “Separate schools shall be maintained for children of the white and colored races.”12”
― Jessica Barbata Jackson, Dixie’s Italians: Sicilians, Race, and Citizenship in the Jim Crow Gulf South

“Can it be possible that Mississippians hold that Italians, like the negro, are of a different race from our own, or do they place different nationality on the same plane with different race? —The Outlook, 1907”
― Jessica Barbata Jackson, Dixie’s Italians: Sicilians, Race, and Citizenship in the Jim Crow Gulf South

“In the cases of Shelby and Sumrall, the native-born white community justified their efforts to exclude Italian children from local schools by accessing an existing anti-Italian script that defended separation in racial terms. More than just ethnic prejudice, native-born whites employed this racialized discourse to segregate, so that they might validate the near-lynching of Scaglioni, and ultimately remove what they perceived to be economically threatening Italians from their community. A symptom of larger issues, these twenty-five Italian schoolchildren in Sumrall became caught up in a bias and prejudice intended to pressure their parents into labor conformity.”
― Jessica Barbata Jackson, Dixie’s Italians: Sicilians, Race, and Citizenship in the Jim Crow Gulf South

“The two most reported endeavors to exclude Sicilians and other Italians from white schools both took place in rural Mississippi: the Frier incident in Sumrall, Lamar County, in 1907, and an earlier incident in 1906 Shelby, Bolivar County.”
― Jessica Barbata Jackson, Dixie’s Italians: Sicilians, Race, and Citizenship in the Jim Crow Gulf South

“As the 1907 school year began in Sumrall, Mississippi, Joseph and Josephine Frier, two Italian children, applied for admission to the public white school.1 What followed was a complex back-and-forth school segregation story that predated Brown v. Board of Education. Interpreting the Friers’ enrollment as “forcing” their way in, parents of the native-born white students “objected to the presence” of the Italians and “demanded that they be excluded.”2 The local community began to take measures to expel the “suspect” children from the “white” school. When the Italian children arrived on the first day of school, Principal Harbert suspended the Friers “pending a decision” from the state superintendent of education.3 To protest the expulsion, a group of Italian laborers led by Sicilian shoemaker Frank Scaglioni appealed to the state authorities and to the Italian consulate in New Orleans.4 When the state superintendent ruled in favor of the Italian children’s right to attend the “white” school, the Friers returned to classes for the remainder of the week. Yet with tensions so heightened, the “usually quiet place [of Sumrall] was . . . in the throes of a racial revolution that [could] shake the entire State of Mississippi.”5 In the darkness of Friday night, a mass of local “white citizens” kidnapped Scaglioni from his home. Hurling insults as they bound him with rope, they hauled him to the woods beyond the outskirts of town; there, the mob viciously beat and whipped him. Left bleeding in the woods, “more dead than alive, [Scaglioni] later dragged himself home.”6 On Monday, the Italian schoolchildren did not return to classes, but instead packed their belongings with their families and fled Sumrall.”
― Jessica Barbata Jackson, Dixie’s Italians: Sicilians, Race, and Citizenship in the Jim Crow Gulf South

“We are native-born by accident; they are citizens by choice and preference.”
― Jessica Barbata Jackson, Dixie’s Italians: Sicilians, Race, and Citizenship in the Jim Crow Gulf South

“The lynching in 1901 in Erwin, Mississippi, which departs from the pattern of the previously discussed lynchings, illustrates this restructuring. In November 1900, a horse belonging to the young Vincenzo Serio, a native of Cefalù, Sicily, wandered onto the property of the plantation manager G. B. Allen. The incursion devolved into an animated dispute, whereby a convergence of armed men shot and injured Vincenzo. Vincenzo escaped to nearby Greenville, but upon recovering, returned to the township of Glen Allan, some forty miles south on Lake Washington, to rejoin his father Giovanni. On his return, citizens in the community issued an order giving Vincenzo thirty days to leave the village, an order he disregarded.104 During the evening of July 10, 1901, incensed by Vincenzo’s blatant insolence, Allen made no secret of gathering together an armed contingent to finish what he had begun eight months beforehand. On three separate occasions, friends of the Serios attempted to contact Vincenzo, who was staying in neighboring Erwin, to warn him of the impending threat; they were prevented by both force and fear from using the parish telephone.105 Under the impression that the trouble had blown over and not “suspecting danger,” Vincenzo and his father, along with two other Sicilian friends, went to sleep that same night in hammocks hung in the gallery of their home. After midnight, a “volley of rifle and pistol bullets were poured into them.”106 Father and son, Giovanni and Vincenzo, were shot to death, and Salvatore Liberto took a bullet to”
― Jessica Barbata Jackson, Dixie’s Italians: Sicilians, Race, and Citizenship in the Jim Crow Gulf South

“A singular reference laid claim to Joe’s Sicilian origins, proclaiming him a “half-breed . . . son of a Sicilian father and mulatto mother.”56 But the New York Times report remains inconsistent with a more comprehensive reading and broader sampling of press reports of Joe’s racial identity. According to most accounts, Joe was a “negro,” “a young half breed,” and a “colored man.”57 One report branded Joe a “desperate half-breed between negro and creole.”58 The Memphis Daily Appeal explained that Joe was well known along the Mississippi River from New Orleans clear up to Cairo in southwestern Illinois, a “desperate character, evil and treacherous as half breeds generally are.”59 The Daily Picayune went on to report that local “negroes [were] raising some trouble about the lynching” and were threatening to kill the group of men responsible for guarding Joe. As the Picayune warned, “Should the negroes attempt this, the citizens of Australia, [Mississippi,] have ordered a lot of Winchester rifles and will be prepared.”60 Across the dozen articles that mentioned “Dago Joe,” the singular New York Times report made the only claim to Joe’s Sicilian origins, indicating that Joe cannot be unequivocally included within this compilation of Sicilian lynchings.61”
― Jessica Barbata Jackson, Dixie’s Italians: Sicilians, Race, and Citizenship in the Jim Crow Gulf South

“The lynching of “Dago Joe” on June 11, 1887, in Shelby, Mississippi, both highlights and obscures this developing association. Throughout the late spring of 1887, local papers reported on the latest news concerning “the dago who killed young Mr. Walter Haynes.”51 “Dago Joe,” the press proclaimed, was aiming at a station agent who had expelled him from a depot building, when he “accidentally” and “without provocation” shot the “innocent” and “popular” Haynes; a statewide manhunt promptly ensued.52 The Greenville Times reported on various attempts to capture the “dago,” including one instance in which a local citizen shot himself in the foot “endeavoring to creep up” on someone mistakenly believed to be “Dago Joe.”53 By June, the Daily Picayune reported that “Dago Joe,” the “murderer,” had been lynched: “From last reports Dago Joe was still swinging.”54 However, despite his moniker and despite the fact that “Dago Joe” is included within existing tabulations of Sicilian lynchings, he may not have actually been Italian.”
― Jessica Barbata Jackson, Dixie’s Italians: Sicilians, Race, and Citizenship in the Jim Crow Gulf South

“In Madison Parish and St. Charles Parish, Louisiana, and Washington County and Bolivar County, Mississippi, Italians made up more than two-thirds, even upwards of three-quarters, of the foreign-born white population.24 Rather, the economic and political exceptionality of certain Sicilians and other Italians—which requires turning to the historical particularities of each instance—explains what marked these “white” Italians as lynchable. Furthermore, these lynchings of Sicilians and other Italians, in their discursive afterlives and through the production of race as an aftereffect of the violence, shaped concepts of race and citizenship throughout the Gulf South between 1880 and 1910.”
― Jessica Barbata Jackson, Dixie’s Italians: Sicilians, Race, and Citizenship in the Jim Crow Gulf South

“son in Erwin, Mississippi (1901).8 Unquestionably, black lynching victims immeasurably outnumbered nonblack lynching victims.”
― Jessica Barbata Jackson, Dixie’s Italians: Sicilians, Race, and Citizenship in the Jim Crow Gulf South

“Just as plantation owners initially encouraged Italian migration because of the demands for inexpensive labor, economic mandates propelled US state officials to categorize Italian immigrants as American citizens to avoid paying indemnities.”
― Jessica Barbata Jackson, Dixie’s Italians: Sicilians, Race, and Citizenship in the Jim Crow Gulf South

“In 1906, “members of every Italian society in the city” contributed to the purchase and dedication of a statue of Giuseppe Garibaldi, the revolutionary hero of Italian unification who had famously invaded and conquered Sicily in 1860.101 Significant not only because Sicilians and other Italians acted in tandem, but because Garibaldi remains the iconic figure of the Italian Risorgimento and a key symbol in the process of nationalizing the peninsula and conquering the South.”
― Jessica Barbata Jackson, Dixie’s Italians: Sicilians, Race, and Citizenship in the Jim Crow Gulf South

“The citizenship identity of Sicilian immigrants—an imposed and ascribed nationality activated by their movement across borders—contributed to a regionally fragmented community of Sicilians and other Italians in New Orleans. As early as 1884, at a celebration of the unification of the state of Italy, certain Italian community members endeavored to “unite the Italian residents” of New Orleans across their ascribed nationality as Italians.”
― Jessica Barbata Jackson, Dixie’s Italians: Sicilians, Race, and Citizenship in the Jim Crow Gulf South

“Sicilians and other Italians in Louisiana identified themselves as distinctly different, just as Usticesi were unique from Contessiotti.”
― Jessica Barbata Jackson, Dixie’s Italians: Sicilians, Race, and Citizenship in the Jim Crow Gulf South

“Southern Italians in the Brigands War of the early 1860s,”
― Jessica Barbata Jackson, Dixie’s Italians: Sicilians, Race, and Citizenship in the Jim Crow Gulf South

“Fava additionally countered the claim that the victims had refused to comply with military service in Italy and provided additional sworn statements that Venturella had completed his service and that Arena and Salardino were both only sons, which meant they were in the “third class” and exempt from service.86”
― Jessica Barbata Jackson, Dixie’s Italians: Sicilians, Race, and Citizenship in the Jim Crow Gulf South