Thousands of people, among them the most prominent
businessmen, lawyers, merchants and politicians in New Orleans, marched in
circles around a statue of Henry Clay. The crowd was “yelling itself hoarse,”
bent on a kind of justice that would be called murder today but that The
Washington Post and numerous other newspapers called “vengeance” in 1891.
The mob’s victims awaited in the Orleans Parish jail, all of
them Italian immigrants or children of immigrants who had just been acquitted
in the shooting death of the New Orleans police chief; others still awaited
trial. To this day, the chief’s killer or killers have never been identified.
But on the morning of March 14, 1891, despite the not-guilty verdicts, the mob
seemed certain.
“When the law is powerless,” William Parkerson, the mob’s
leader and mayor’s former campaign manager, yelled to the crowd, according to a
1991 New Orleans Times-Picayune article, “rights delegated by the people are
relegated back to the people, and they are justified in doing that which the
courts have failed to do.”
Once the speeches finished, The Post reported then, everyone
stood still for a moment, quiet just long enough for one man’s voice to catch
the agitated crowd’s attention: “Shall we get our guns?”
The verdict was decisive. That morning, anywhere from 8,000
to 20,000 vigilantes armed with Winchester rifles, axes and shotguns broke down
the door of the parish jail and trampled past the passive sheriff’s deputies
until they captured 11 defenseless Italians and riddled their bodies with
bullets. Two were dragged outside and hanged, one by a tree limb and the other
by a lamp post.
Historians have called the massacre the largest mass lynching in American history. The
vigilante mob escaped any consequence, and the city of New Orleans refused to
take responsibility.
But now, 128 years later, the city is trying to make amends
On April 12, New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell (D) is expected to apologize to
the Italian American community for the infamous killings — a concession that
Michael Santo, special counsel to the Order Sons and Daughters of Italy, said
will shore up “long-lasting wounds” among Italians. The mayor is expected to
issue a formal proclamation, according to the group. A spokesman for Cantrell
confirmed the pending apology to the Associated Press on Sunday.
“This is not something that’s too little, too late,” Santo
told The Post. “This is something that has to be addressed.”
The lynchings were a product of anti-Italian sentiment and
public hysteria over a shadowy “Mafia” in the aftermath of the chief’s slaying,
according to a 1992 paper in the Journal of the Louisiana Historical
Association by John V. Baiamonte Jr.
To read more CLICK HERE
No comments:
Post a Comment