Five years ago, while researching the Italian-American experience, filmmaker Heather Hartley stumbled onto one of the uglier episodes in American history: the lynching of 11 Italians in New Orleans in March of 1891. Like most Americans, Hartley, assistant professor of communications at Penn State, had never heard of the incident. Intrigued, she resolved to make it the focus of a short film.
New Orleans, 1891
The fate of numerous Italian Americans was no different than that of other ethnic groups targeted by lynch mobs. The most infamous lynching of Italians occurred on March 14, 1891 in New Orleans. This event claimed eleven victims and was one of the largest multiple lynching in American history. The catalyst for this tragedy was the unsolved murder of popular city police superintendent David Hennessy. Hennessy’s murder led to a roundup of the “usual suspects” — in this case Italians. Those detained, immigrants from Sicily and the southern portions of Italy — possessed swarthy complexions and were viewed with suspicion and contempt by the white protestant elite ruling New Orleans. Akin to Negroes, Italians were “not quite white” and subject to a racial prejudice only slightly subtler — mingled with a baseless and deliberately orchestrated Mafia scare associating most Italian Americans with a vast criminal organization that did not exist in the New Orleans of that era.
The morning of March 14 was bright and sunny. By ten o’clock, a crowd of thousands was gathered by the Parish Jail, with many of them shouting, “Yes, yes, hang the dagoes!” The prison was soon attacked by a carefully selected band culled by the mobs’ leaders comprised of about twenty-five well-armed men. With battering rams ringing in their ears, the prisoners were both trapped and doomed. In the prison yard where several Italians were clustered together at one end, the hit squad of lynchers opened fire from about twenty feet away. More than a hundred rifle shots and shotgun blasts were fired into six helpless men, tearing their bodies apart. When the firing stopped, the squad inspected their victims. A man saw Pietro Monasterio’s hand twitch and yelled, “Hey, this one’s alive!” “Give him another load, “ another gunman answered. “Can’t, I ain’t got the heart.” Then one of the men walked up to the body, aimed a shotgun point-blank, and literally blew the top of Monasterio’s head away. Someone laughed. There were two or three cheers. One or two men turned their faces away, looking sick.
So it went. Joseph P. Macheca, Antonio Scaffidi, and Antonio Marchesi were shot while turning to face their pursuers. Marchesi was struck in the head by a bullet. As he raised his right hand to shield himself a shotgun charge blew off and went on to disintegrate the top of his skull. Yet he did not die until nine hours later, lying all the time where he fell.
More gunmen found Manuel Polizzi. Sitting on the floor in a corner of a cell, muttering to himself. Dragged by five men into a corridor he was shot two or three times while staring with wild eyes at nothing in particular. Antonio Bagnetto was found in another cell, pretending to be dead. He too was shot. Several of the men’s corpses were displayed to the mob outside the prison and hung on lampposts for all to see. Witnesses said that the cheers were nearly deafening.
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