Congress paid indemnities only to citizen families, excluding the noncitizen lynched.

Evidence

Once again, on March 3, 1901, Congress appropriated a sum of 4,000 (just under 150,000 today) to be paid “out of humane considerations, without reference to the liability thereof, to the Italian Government as full indemnity to the heirs of Joseph (Giuseppe) DiFatta and John (Giovanni) Cirano, Italian citizens lynched at Tallulah, on July 20, 1899.” The other three victims’ families received nothing because a Department of Justice investigation found they were not Italian citizens. — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 143

Categorization

• QUESTION: The differential treatment within one same lynching — citizens compensated, noncitizens not — is a compact demonstration that indemnity turned on legal status, useful for the reader’s legal-brief framing.