One of the largest multiple lynchings in American history was not of Blacks but of Italian immigrants in New Orleans.
The catalyst was the murder of popular New Orleans Police Chief David Hennessy, who was ambushed by five gunmen outside his home on Oct. 15, 1890. As he lay dying, Hennessy reportedly blamed “the dagoes,” and the killing was widely believed to be a Mafia hit.
New Orleans Police Chief David Hennessey died at Charity Hospital, 10 hours after being attacked on Girod Street outside his home.
Immediately after the shooting, 250 Italians were rounded up, virtually all without probable cause. Of this group, 19 men were eventually indicted. A jury trial of nine of them in 1891 ended with only mistrials and acquittals.
Outraged residents called for a meeting on Canal Street the next day “to take steps to remedy the failure of justice.”
A mob some 20,000 people formed in front of Orleans Parish Prison on this day in history.
About twenty-five well-armed men from the mobs’ leaders forced their way inside. They dragged most of the defendants from the jail, along with two other Italians being held on unrelated charges. In the prison yard, the hit squad opened fire from about twenty feet away. More than a hundred rifle shots and shotgun blasts were fired into six of the helpless men at one end, tearing their bodies apart.
Three others were shot while turning to face their pursuers. The two remaining victims were found inside prison cells, where they were also shot. Several of the men’s corpses were displayed to the mob outside the prison and hung on lampposts for all to see. Witnesses said that the cheers were nearly deafening.
New Orleans residents gather on March 14, 1891. Speakers exhorted the crowd to go to parish prison and lynch the Italians charged with killing Police Chief David Hennessey. Photo courtesy of the Historic New Orleans Collection
The lynchings were followed by mass arrests of Italian immigrants throughout New Orleans, and waves of attacks against Italians nationwide.
The local press and the mayor defended the mob action as justifiable, but the federal government paid reparations to the families of the men. However, no one was ever tried for the lynchings.
National reaction wasn’t much better. Teddy Roosevelt, not yet president, famously said the lynching was “a rather good thing.” A March 16, 1891 editorial in “The New York Times” argued:
These sneaking and cowardly Sicilians, the descendants of bandits and assassins, who have transported to this country the lawless passions, the cut-throat practices, and the oath-bound societies of their native country, are to us a pest without mitigation. Our own rattlesnakes are as good citizens as they…Lynch law was the only course open to the people of New Orleans.”
Newspaper drawing of the lynch mob that attacked Parish Prison in New Orleans in 1891.
The incident caused an international diplomatic conflict, and heightened the association of the word “mafia” with Italian immigrants.
John Parker, who helped organize the lynch mob, later went on to be governor of Louisiana. In 1911, he said of Italians that they were “just a little worse than the Negro, being if anything filthier in [their] habits, lawless, and treacherous.”
The New York Times published an analysis of “How Italians Became White” observing:
The Italian-Americans who labored in the campaign that overturned racist immigration restrictions in 1965 used the romantic fictions built up around Columbus to political advantage. This shows yet again how racial categories that people mistakenly view as matters of biology grow out of highly politicized myth making.”
Legal Legacy 
Wow!! I had read something about early Italian immigrants being the victims of some rather infamous lynching incidents in the South, but I had no idea that they were as intense as they were. It’s weird, however, that people who’ve historically experienced overt prejudice themselves often come up to be unsympathetic to others.
Italians became the scapegoats for crime in New Orleans. The Sicilians in New Orleans were hard working family people who were hated for their poverty and Mediterranean culture. This ruthlessness shows how deeply engrained prejudice was and still is in this country.