Italians in the American South were raced toward Blackness and lynched

Evidence

A case in point were dark-skinned Sicilians in the American South. When a group of Sicilians were lynched in Louisiana in 1891, the press justified the violence by highlighting their brutal nature arising from southern Italian culture and biology. Three more Italians in Louisiana were lynched in 1896 as punishment for fraternization with Blacks. In 1898, some delegates at the Louisiana state constitutional convention argued that Italians should be disenfranchised because they are “as black as the blackest negro in existence.” — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim, 392

Categorization

• QUESTION: If Italians could be legally disenfranchised on grounds of being ‘as black as the blackest negro’ yet retain legal Whiteness, what did that mean for legal remedies — does degree of skin color become a factual predicate courts weighed?
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim: When Racism Quashes…, 392
• XREF: connects to: Bank officials racialized Italians as descendants of Roman slaves — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order: How Economists…, 1406; Southern congressmen framed southern European immigrants as racially impure — John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of…, 984; Southern congressmen racialized southern Europeans by analogy to miscegenation with Blacks. — John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of…, 2304