Italians were lynched for refusing to uphold Southern racial hierarchy.

Evidence

The anti-Italian sentiment that led white mobs to repeatedly lynch Italians was largely motivated by a desire for retaliation. As new immigrants, Italians did not behave like Southern white men in a most important matter: race. Italians did not come here with the view that black Americans were their inferiors. When they became merchants, they treated their black and white customers equally. Their children went to school with black children (not by choice but by law), and they were willing to work with and take the side of their fellow black workers—not their employers or plantation owners. White Louisianans aided by a complicit justice system used lynching to control Italians—just as white Americans used it to control black Americans, as we will see in Part II. But Italians had one significant advantage that black Americans did not: They had a country and government willing to fight for them. — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 144

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: This reframes lynching as enforcement of the racial-economic order rather than mere hatred — exactly the ‘saturated-system harm’ claim, linking to the reader’s standing concern about decorum toward corpses and how systems police hierarchy.
• DEEPTHINKING: The phrase ‘did not come here with the view that black Americans were their inferiors’ — whiteness as something to be performed and policed, not innate — is the heart of the book’s structural argument.

Related

• White Americans lynched Italian immigrants for refusing white supremacy racial norms (similarity 0.90)
• White supremacy could expel Italians from whiteness when useful. (similarity 0.78)