Daily Archives: January 11, 2010

Videos for the Classroom: Lynchings of Italians in the 19th-20th Centuries

This clip is extremely disturbing to watch, so please use caution in your classrooms.

To buttress my argument from last week, i.e. images of Italians, I’m enclosing a clip from a documentary about the Italian-American experience.  This segment deals mostly with the 1891 New Orleans lynching of Italians, but also has brutal images of lynchings all across the American South. 

According to the documentary, 39 Italians were lynched before World War I, mostly due to their “non-white” nature.

Before Pauly D and Mike “The Situation from MTV’s Jersey Shore start throwing their Italianness around like a gob of hair gel, maybe they should look at the sacrifices their ancestors made in order for them to enjoy their “lifestyle.”

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