The United States once paid reparations for lynched Italian Americans

Evidence

It began several years ago at my summer home on Martha’s Vineyard, where my then-colleague Carol Anderson, currently the Robert W. Woodruff Professor of African American Studies at Emory University, was visiting me. It was late morning, and I was working on my second cup of coffee. We were sitting in the dining room as she told me about one of her classes. Carol casually mentioned that the United States had paid reparations for the lynching of Italians in New Orleans. — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 24

Categorization

• SHARE: A striking, little-known fact for anyone who debates reparations: the US compensated a European-immigrant group for lynching while never compensating Black people for U.S. lynching.
• SEED: Potential essay: the Italian-lynching reparations as the hidden precedent that undoes the ‘reparations are un-American’ objection.
• XREF: connects to: Italian immigrants were lynched for alleged crimes without legal process. — John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of…, 538