HOW ITALIANS FINALLY BECAME WHITE IN AMERICA

How Italians became white Americans is not a story about a law changing. No statute was ever passed. On paper they were white the whole time — naturalization was limited to free white persons from seventeen ninety to nineteen fifty-two, and every census counted them as white. And yet in nineteen twenty-two an Alabama court could not establish that a woman from Sicily was white. Both are true, about the same people, in the same country. THE CASE THAT OPENS IT. Jim Rollins, a Black man, was convicted in Alabama of living with a white woman. On appeal the state had to prove she was white. The testimony established only that Edith Labue came from Sicily, and the court held this "can in no sense be taken as conclusive that she was therefore a white woman." The reversal also rested on a confession taken at gunpoint — but that sentence is in the opinion. THREE CATEGORIES IN A COUNTRY WITH TWO. An Indiana newspaper explained the South in eighteen ninety-nine: people there would classify the population as "whites, dagoes and negroes." Sicilians recruited onto Louisiana cane fields worked rows worked by enslaved people a generation earlier, were paid in plantation scrip, and some were held in conditions prosecuted as peonage. White schools in the Mississippi Delta turned Italian children away. NEW ORLEANS, EIGHTEEN NINETY-ONE. After police chief David Hennessy was shot, nineteen Italians were charged. Six were acquitted, the jury hung on the rest, and the next day a mob — summoned by a signed notice in the morning papers — broke into the parish prison and killed eleven. Nobody was prosecuted. Italy recalled its ambassador and there was serious talk of war. Benjamin Harrison paid an indemnity and proclaimed the first national Columbus Day. THE WEST GAVE THE OPPOSITE ANSWER. In California, Italians were white almost on arrival. They bought land, planted the Napa and Sonoma vineyards, and founded a bank that became one of the largest in the country. Not because California was kinder — its color line was pointed at Chinese and Japanese immigrants, and when a line sits there, Italians land on the white side without arguing. WHAT THE GOVERNMENT PUBLISHED. The Dictionary of Races or Peoples, part of a forty-one volume congressional study completed in nineteen eleven, split Italians in two. Northern Italians: a "broad-headed and tallish race," cool, deliberate, capable of progress. Southern Italians: a "long-headed, dark, Mediterranean race of short stature," excitable, impulsive, "impracticable" — with a suggested "infusion of African blood" among Sicilians. Thirteen years later Congress wrote that logic into law. The nineteen twenty-four act never says the word Italian. It sets quotas from the eighteen ninety census, before the Italians arrived. Italy's quota: 3,845. Germany got 51,227. Italians had been arriving at roughly 200,000 a year. HONEST FRAMING A serious body of scholarship argues Italians never "became" white because they always were. Thomas Guglielmo's White on Arrival makes that case; others note no official reclassification ever happened, and that anti-Italian violence was very small beside the lynching of Black Americans. All correct. Stefano Luconi's answer is the one this video follows: both theories assume one national experience, and there wasn't one. There was never one color line — there were several, pointed at different people. CHAPTERS 0:00 — An Alabama court cannot say if she is white 2:28 — On paper they were white the whole time 5:43 — Whites, dagoes and negroes: three categories 4:10 — Two Americas, running in opposite directions 8:07 — New Orleans, eighteen ninety-one: eleven men 9:52 — Why Columbus Day exists 10:18 — California made them white on arrival 12:05 — Congress publishes the Dictionary of Races 13:41 — The quota act that never says the word Italian 15:40 — Enemy aliens: the part nobody covers 17:12 — Why there was never one answer 19:00 — Back to Edith Labue TELL ME WHAT YOU FIND If your family came through Ellis Island or New Orleans, pull the ship manifest and the census pages after it, and look at the column marked race or color. What did the enumerator write for your great-grandfather, and did it match ten years later? Put the port and state in the comments. #ItalianAmerican #Genealogy #AmericanHistory #Immigration #AmericanBloodlines how Italians became white, were Italians considered white, Italian American history, 1891 New Orleans lynching, Dictionary of Races 1911, Johnson-Reed Act Italian quota, Rollins v State Alabama 1922