It’s Columbus Day and Brent Staples has written a fascinating article in the New York Times about the roots of the holiday. Summary:

Few who march in Columbus Day parades or recount the tale of Columbus’s voyage from Europe to the New World are aware of how the holiday came about or that President Benjamin Harrison proclaimed it as a one-time national celebration in 1892 — in the wake of a bloody New Orleans lynching that took the lives of 11 Italian immigrants. The proclamation was part of a broader attempt to quiet outrage among Italian-Americans, and a diplomatic blowup over the murders that brought Italy and the United States to the brink of war.

The larger article is about how Italian immigrants became “white” over the years. In their early migration, Italians, particularly Sicilians, were treated as black people were treated. Badly. They did “black” work and lived and established businesses among black people. They suffered, notoriously in the mass lynching in New Orleans, and in racial stereotyping.

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I knew nothing of this Columbus Day history, but the article stirred me. I grew up in Lake Charles, La., a Gulf of Mexico port city with a rich immigrant population, including many Sicilians. They had bakeries, groceries, cafes and clothing and mercantile stores in the predominantly black northern part of town where my dad grew up. Their kids went to school with him and were lifelong friends, so much so that he joined an Italian social club later in life. I would come to learn from that association how conservative many of his gumbadis grew up to be. If you know what I mean. One of the kindest of them, who I also knew as a devoted helper of homeless and needy, removed the handful of seats from his tiny cafe and made it takeout-only on passage of the public accommodations portion of the civil rights law.

Donald Trump was a child of a group of immigrants once scorned in some quarters, too.

By the way: The recruitment of Italians for cheap farm labor in the 19th century spread from Louisiana into Arkansas — with 1,000 put to work on the Sunnyside Plantation in Chicot County, as the Encyclopedia of Arkansas recounts.

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The Sunnyside project didn’t end well, but some of those families established themselves elsewhere in Arkansas, including Tontitown.

Christopher Columbus, by the way, wasn’t such a great guy, as Vox recounts.

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It’s somewhat old hat at this point to point out that Christopher Columbus — in whose name children are off school and mail isn’t delivered today — was a homicidal tyrant who initiated the two greatest crimes in the history of the Western Hemisphere, the Atlantic slave trade, and the American Indian genocide.

 

 

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