Columbus Days

monument to Italian immigrants in New Orleans, from the New York Times story referenced below.

Brent Staples has an interesting story in the New York Times Magazine that asserts there was a reason for the first Columbus Day beyond the assumed homage to the Italian mariner working for Spain.  It emerged from a violent history of prejudice against Italians in America.

My mother was born in Italy, so I have been aware of prejudice against Italians in America, including against Italian-Americans.  I experienced some low level prejudice in my own childhood, and that was at the height of the Italian-American ascendancy (Frank Sinatra, Joe DiMaggio, and Italian language songs on top forty radio, etc.)  I've also been aware that for generations in America, Italians were not considered white--they were black.  Even in my time, members of certain ethnic groups and upper classes considered us "not quite white."

(The comments to Staples' story testify to many more overt and even violent acts of anti-Italian bigotry, including some more recent than the 1950s.)

But I did not know the extent of either the prejudice or of the identifying of Italians as black, until I read the Staples piece.  In the 19th century it seems, it was not only blacks who were lynched in the South, but Italians as well. This happened particularly in New Orleans, where there was a large Italian community. Moreover, such lynchings were approved of in the North, by among others, the New York Times.

But there was one difference in their ability to respond.  African Americans were cut off from their countries of origin from which they had been forcibly removed, which in any case were often colonies of European powers that condoned slavery.  But Italian Americans, usually more recent immigrants, had a European country that had an army and European allies.

When news spread of particularly blatant lynchings of Italians in New Orleans, the government of Italy protested, to the point of breaking off diplomatic relations and threatening war against the United States.

President Benjamin Harrison wound up paying reparations, but he also tried a p.r. tactic to associate Italian immigrants with American origins by declaring the first Columbus Day in 1892.

It was supposed to be a one-time thing, but Italian Americans embraced the idea, and made Columbus their signature hero.  Columbus Day parades became larger, and the legend of Columbus became inflated well beyond the historical facts.

Native American activist Michael Haney appearing on Oprah in
a 1992 show on racism in America. Also on that show was
activist and poet Suzan Harjo, who received the Presidential
Medal of Freedom from President Obama in 2014.

Fast forward a century, to 1992.  What was supposed to be the 500th anniversary of Columbus "discovering America" as we all learned in school in the 50s, and the centennial of the first Columbus Day, instead evoked a new awareness of the reality of 1492--the presence of millions of Indigenous people in hundreds of thriving cultures almost everywhere in this hemisphere--and their eradication by European diseases and genocide.

This awareness was led by Native American activists and writers, and began a revolution in attitudes.  Knowledge is still weak and there are cases of prominent racism surviving,  notably in the names of major sports teams, but that revolution is ongoing.

So Columbus Day in a fairly odd way has been instrumental in exposing and even reducing prejudice against two groups: Italians and Native peoples.   There's much more to all these stories, but this part of them is rife with the oddities and ironies, as well as the pain, of the American experience.