The Lynching of Italians and the Rise of Antilynching Politics in the United States

Abstract

In the years following the end of Reconstruction lynching became a favored method of White supremacist terror in the US South. Despite presidential efforts to quell racist violence in the 1870s, throughout the 1880s, presidents tended to ignore lynchings, and northern newspapers legitimized lynchings as a form of rough justice. Over time, however, presidents began to denounce lynchings, and northern newspapers began to argue that lynching shamed the United States before the civilized world. Scholars disagree, however, on both when and why the presidency and newspapers began to oppose lynching. We show that the lynching of Italian nationals catalyzed opposition to lynching from both the presidency and national newspapers starting in 1891. Using new data from across the United States, Great Britain, and Italy, we trace the political impact of the lynching of Italians. Lynchings of Italians brought immediate political pressure from the Italian embassy and generated broad international condemnation of the lynching of Italians in the United States. Ida B. Wells exploited this international outrage on her 1894 British tour to draw international attention to the lynching of Black Americans. International condemnation led presidents that were sensitive to their international reputation to denounce lynching, first of Italians, but later of Black victims. Our account dates the rise of antilynching politics earlier than accounts that focus on Ida B. Wells's British tour of 1894, or the NAACP's antilynching campaign post-World War I.