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Eleven Men on Canal Street: The 1891 New Orleans Lynching and the Road to Columbus Day
A mob’s murder of 11 Italian immigrants became one of the darkest chapters in Italian American history — and its diplomatic fallout helped give the country a holiday Italian Americans would claim as their own. On the night of October 15, 1890, New Orleans police superintendent David Hennessy was ambushed by gunmen a few steps from his home. He died the next morning. Before he did, according to the story that raced through the city, he answered the question of who had shot him with a single slur: “Dagoes.” That one word, never verified, was enough. Mayor Joseph Shakspeare told police to scour the neighborhood and arrest every Italian they came across, and officers swept up well over a hundred Sicilian and Italian immigrants in the days that followed. Nineteen men were eventually indicted in connection with the killing. Nine went to trial first. On March 13, 1891, the jury acquitted six of them and could not reach a verdict on the other three. A Mob at the Statue The next morning, local newspapers carried a notice calling citizens to a mass meeting at the statue of Henry Clay on Canal Street. Thousands came. They were led not by drifters but by some of the city’s most prominent men, among them the lawyer William S. Parkerson, who told the crowd that the courts had failed and that the people would have to act. The crowd marched to Parish Prison, forced its way inside and hunted the Italian prisoners through the building. Eleven men were killed. Two were dragged outside and hanged; the others were shot. Several had just been acquitted. Some had never been tried at all. Their names were Antonio Bagnetto, James Caruso, Loreto Comitz, Rocco Geraci, Joseph Macheca, Antonio Marchesi, Pietro Monasterio, Emanuele Polizzi, Frank Romero, Antonio Scaffidi and Charles Traina. The killing is often described as the largest mass lynching in American history. A grand jury later examined the killings. It indicted no one. “Rather a Good Thing” Much of the country applauded. Major newspapers, including The New York Times, ran editorials that blamed the dead men rather than the mob. In a letter to his sister, a young Theodore Roosevelt described dining with “various dago diplomats” who were upset about the killings. “Personally I think it rather a good thing,” he wrote, “and said so.” Coverage of the case also helped bring the word “mafia” into the mainstream American press, attaching a criminal stereotype to Italian immigrants that would follow their children and grandchildren for generations. A Diplomatic Crisis Italy saw it differently. Several of the victims were Italian citizens, and Rome demanded that the killers be punished and the families compensated. When Washington replied that it could not interfere with a state matter, Italy recalled its ambassador, Baron Saverio Fava. The United States withdrew its own minister from Rome, and talk of war appeared in newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic. No war came. In his annual message to Congress that December, President Benjamin Harrison called the lynching “a most deplorable and discreditable incident.” In 1892, his administration agreed to pay Italy $25,000 for the victims’ families, and diplomatic relations were restored. The Road to Columbus Day That same year brought the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s first voyage. Harrison issued a proclamation urging Americans to mark the occasion with ceremonies in schools and public gatherings across the country. Many historians see the gesture as, in part, an olive branch to Italy and to Italian Americans after New Orleans. For a community still treated as outsiders, Columbus became a symbol of belonging: an Italian at the very start of the American story. Italian American organizations spent decades pushing for national recognition, and in 1937 Columbus Day became a federal holiday. Today the holiday is contested. Many states and cities now observe Indigenous Peoples’ Day instead or alongside it, and debate over Columbus’s legacy continues. Far less widely known is the act of violence against Italian immigrants that helped bring the holiday into being. An Apology, 128 Years Later In April 2019, New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell formally apologized on behalf of the city for the 1891 killings, at an event attended by Italian American leaders and descendants of the community. The apology could not undo what happened on Canal Street. But it named the dead as victims rather than suspects, and it acknowledged something Italian American history makes plain: the line between outsider and American has often been drawn by force, and Italian immigrants once stood on the wrong side of it. Every October, as the country argues over what Columbus Day should mean, the names of those 11 men are worth remembering too.