American when it knew how to handle immigrants like Trump wants:
New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell will officially apologize Friday for the largest mass lynching in U.S. history. On March 14, 1891, the city of New Orleans became a charnel house as a mob of as many as 20,000 wantonly slaughtered 11 Italian-Americans. Some of the victims had been charged in the murder of a police chief, but the trials all ended in acquittal or mistrial. A gang descended on the jail where the men were being held, shot them to death, and displayed their bodies for the savage rabble outside. Southern belles in search of souvenirs dipped their lace handkerchiefs in the blood of the butchered Italians.
And the press cheered. The New York Times editorialized on March 16: “These sneaking and cowardly Sicilians, the descendants of bandits and assassins, who have transported to this country the lawless passions, the cut-throat practices, and the oath-bound societies of their native country, are to us a pest without mitigations.”
The Washington Post even extolled the killers as “cool-headed men, lawyers, doctors, merchants, and political leaders, all person of influence and social standing.”
Theodore Roosevelt, then a member of the U.S. Civil Service Commission, wrote to his sister Anna Roosevelt Cowles on March 21: “Monday we dined at the Camerons; various dago diplomats were present, all much wrought up by the lynching of the Italians in New Orleans. Personally I think it rather a good thing, and said so.”
From coyoteblog |
