It was not just that Italians did not look white to certain social arbiters, but that they did not act white. In New Orleans Italian immigrants were stigmatized in the post-Civil War period because they accepted economic niches (farm labor and small tenancy, for instance) marked as "black" by local custom, and because they lived and worked comfortably among blacks. ... From being "like negroes" to being "as bad as negroes" was but a trifling step in dominant Southern thinking; and hence in states like Louisiana, Mississippi, and West Virginia, Italians were known to have been lynched for alleged crimes, or even for violating local racial codes by "fraternizing with blacks." (57)
Matthew Frye Jacobson
Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (1998)
Were there any jazz musicians among these New Orleans Italians' children and grandchildren?
[from a notebook, 2017]
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