1891 New Orleans lynchings
Based on Wikipedia: 1891 New Orleans lynchings
On the morning of March 14, 1891, a crowd of several thousand people gathered near the Parish Prison in New Orleans. They came prepared for action—those were the exact words printed in the newspaper advertisement that summoned them. By noon, eleven Italian immigrants lay dead, their bodies riddled with bullets. Two corpses dangled from trees, left hanging for hours as a public spectacle.
It remains the largest single mass lynching in American history.
The victims had been accused of murdering the city's police chief, David Hennessy. Most had just been acquitted at trial the day before. A few had never even been tried. But acquittal, in this case, only sealed their fate. The angry mob believed the jury had been bought off by a shadowy criminal organization that most Americans were hearing about for the first time: the Mafia.
This is a story about violence, certainly. But it's also a story about who gets to be considered white in America, about how ethnic prejudice can masquerade as law enforcement, and about what happens when a city's elite decide that justice has failed and take matters into their own hands.
The Immigrants Who Replaced Enslaved Workers
To understand the lynching, you first need to understand why thousands of Italians were arriving in New Orleans in the first place.
After the Civil War, sugar planters in Louisiana faced a problem. Slavery was abolished, and they needed workers for their brutal, backbreaking industry. Their solution was to recruit immigrants from southern Italy and Sicily, people desperate enough to accept the grueling conditions that newly freed Black workers increasingly refused.
The business community actively recruited these immigrants. By the 1890s, thousands of Italians were arriving in New Orleans each year. Many settled in the French Quarter, which eventually developed a section known as "Little Sicily." They worked the docks, sold fruit from pushcarts, and opened small shops. They were doing exactly what the planters and merchants had brought them here to do.
And they were despised for it.
Throughout the late nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, Italian immigrants occupied an ambiguous racial category in America. They were legally white, but socially something else entirely. A common slur of the era called them "white niggers"—a phrase that reveals everything about how they were perceived. Too dark, too foreign, too Catholic. Speaking an incomprehensible language and eating strange foods. They existed in a liminal space between the rigid racial categories that defined American society.
Mayor Joseph Shakspeare—yes, that was really his name—captured the prevailing attitude in a letter responding to an inquiry about immigration. The city, he complained, had become attractive to "the worst classes of Europe: Southern Italians and Sicilians...the most idle, vicious, and worthless people among us." He described them as "filthy in their persons and homes" and blamed them for spreading disease. His conclusion was categorical: they were "without courage, honor, truth, pride, religion, or any quality that goes to make a good citizen."
This wasn't just bigotry, though it was certainly that. There was also politics involved.
The Political Machine and Its Enemies
Mayor Shakspeare was a Reform Democrat, which in the context of post-Reconstruction Louisiana meant something specific. He had been elected with the backing of Republicans—a party that had grown increasingly powerless in the South after federal troops withdrew and white Democrats retook control of state governments. Shakspeare and his Republican allies were united against a common enemy: the Regular Democratic Organization, the city's corrupt but entrenched political machine.
Here's the thing that makes this complicated: Italian-American voters strongly supported the machine.
This wasn't irrational on their part. Political machines in American cities often served immigrant communities in practical ways—helping newcomers find jobs, navigate bureaucracy, and access basic services. In return, immigrants voted for machine candidates. It was a transactional relationship, often corrupt, but it worked for people who had few other allies in their new country.
Some historians, including professor Humbert Nelli, have argued that the mayor's vocal anti-Italian prejudice wasn't just cultural hatred. It was also political strategy. If you could paint Italian voters as criminals and degenerates, you could justify suppressing their political power.
This is the context in which Police Chief David Hennessy was murdered.
The Murder of the Police Chief
On the evening of October 15, 1890, Hennessy was walking home from work when several gunmen emerged from the shadows and opened fire. The police chief managed to return fire and chase his attackers before collapsing from his wounds.
What happened next became the foundation for everything that followed—and it may not have happened at all.
According to the official account, when Captain William O'Connor asked the dying Hennessy who had shot him, Hennessy whispered a single word: "dagos." This was a derogatory term for Italians and others of Mediterranean heritage. It was the equivalent of saying "those people" while everyone understood exactly which people you meant.
But here's what's strange. Hennessy was awake in the hospital for several hours after the shooting. He spoke to friends and colleagues. Yet he never named his actual attackers. The only alleged identification was that one whispered ethnic slur—and the witness who claimed to hear it, Captain O'Connor, was never called to testify at the subsequent trial.
Why not call your star witness? Why not have the man who heard the victim's dying words tell the jury what he heard?
There's another layer of complexity. A feud had been brewing between two Italian families—the Provenzanos and the Matrangas—who were business rivals on the New Orleans waterfront. Hennessy had put several Provenzanos in prison, and their appeal trial was coming up. According to some reports, Hennessy planned to present new evidence that would clear the Provenzanos and implicate the Matrangas instead.
If true, the Matrangas had a motive. But a policeman who was friends with Hennessy later testified that the chief had no such plans. The truth remains murky.
What's not murky is what happened next.
The Roundup
Mayor Shakspeare, according to newspaper reports, gave the police a simple instruction: "Scour the whole neighborhood. Arrest every Italian you come across."
They took him at his word. Within 24 hours, 45 people had been arrested. By some accounts, as many as 250 Italians were rounded up in the dragnet. Most were eventually released for lack of evidence—because there was no evidence. They were arrested for being Italian in the wrong city at the wrong time.
Local Italians were terrified. Many didn't leave their homes for days after the murder. They knew how this worked. When something bad happened and someone needed to be blamed, they would be blamed.
Nineteen men were ultimately charged with the murder or as accessories and held without bail. Their alleged crimes ranged from the specific to the absurd:
Charles Matranga was charged with plotting the murder. That made a kind of sense, given the family feud theory.
Pietro Monasterio, a shoemaker, was arrested because he lived across the street from where Hennessy was standing when he was shot. The prosecution claimed the assassins had hidden in his shop. Being a shoemaker in the wrong location became a capital offense.
Antonio Marchesi, a fruit peddler, was arrested because he was friends with Monasterio. He was known to visit the shoe shop. That was apparently enough.
Emmanuele Polizzi was arrested when a policeman identified him as someone he'd seen running from the scene. Polizzi appeared to be mentally ill, and any statements he made were deemed inadmissible.
The Committee of Fifty
A few days after Hennessy's death, Mayor Shakspeare gave a speech that set the tone for everything that followed. He declared that the police chief had been "the victim of Sicilian vengeance" and called upon citizens to "teach these people a lesson they will not forget."
He then appointed a Committee of Fifty—prominent citizens tasked with investigating "the existence of secret societies or bands of oath-bound assassins" and devising "necessary means and the most effectual and speedy measures for the uprooting and total annihilation" of any such organizations.
Read that language carefully. The mayor of a major American city was calling for the "total annihilation" of undefined secret societies before any trial had taken place, before any evidence had been presented. The Committee was chaired by Edgar Farrar, who would later become president of the American Bar Association—the organization that represents the legal profession in America.
The Committee published an open letter to the Italian community that began with a request for cooperation and ended with a threat:
We hope this appeal will be met by you in the same spirit in which we issue it, and that this community will not be driven to harsh and stringent methods outside of the law, which may involve the innocent and guilty alike...Upon you and your willingness to give information depends which of these courses shall be pursued.
This was not subtle. Help us identify the criminals among you, or we will use "methods outside of the law" that will harm the innocent along with the guilty. The choice, the letter implied, was theirs.
The Committee hired private detectives to pose as prisoners and try to extract confessions. This produced nothing useful—the detectives weren't even called to testify at trial. Only Polizzi, the mentally ill defendant, said anything incriminating, and his statements were inadmissible.
Meanwhile, newspapers across the country ran headlines like "Vast Mafia in New Orleans" and "1,100 Dago Criminals." The pretrial publicity was relentless and uniformly damning.
The Trial
The trial of nine defendants began on February 16, 1891. From the start, it was a circus.
Jury selection alone took weeks. Hundreds of prospective jurors were rejected before twelve people could be found who met three criteria: they weren't opposed to capital punishment, they weren't openly prejudiced against Italians, and they weren't Italian themselves. Think about what that second criterion implies—so many people in New Orleans were openly prejudiced that finding twelve who could hide it was a significant challenge.
The evidence presented was, according to a later federal investigation, "exceedingly unsatisfactory." The murder had taken place on a poorly lit street on a damp night. Eyewitness testimony was unreliable. Some witnesses identified suspects not by their faces but by their clothing. The prosecution's theory rested heavily on the weapons found at the scene—shotguns that police claimed were lupara, a "favorite weapon" of the Sicilian Mafia imported from Sicily.
The shotguns had actually been manufactured by the W. Richards Company. They were common weapons throughout the American South, not exotic Sicilian imports.
Captain O'Connor, the man who supposedly heard Hennessy whisper "dagos" with his dying breath, never testified.
Two employees of the defense law firm were arrested during the trial for allegedly attempting to bribe prospective jurors. The charges were eventually dismissed—but not before the newspapers had a field day with the story, reinforcing the narrative that Italian criminals would stop at nothing to corrupt the legal system.
When the federal district attorney later investigated these bribery allegations, he found no evidence linking any of the defendants to the Mafia or to jury tampering.
On March 13, 1891, the jury delivered its verdict. Charles Matranga and Bastian Incardona were found not guilty by directed verdict—meaning the judge ruled that no reasonable jury could convict them because no evidence had been presented against them at all. Four other defendants were acquitted outright. For the remaining three, the jury could not reach a unanimous verdict, resulting in a mistrial.
Six acquittals. Three mistrials. Zero convictions.
The acquitted men were not released. They were returned to prison pending additional charges of "lying in wait" with intent to commit murder—charges that the district attorney admitted he would have to drop without a murder conviction to support them.
The jurors, offered the option of leaving through a side door to avoid the angry crowd, chose to walk out the front. Several defended their decision to reporters, arguing they had "reasonable doubt" and had done what they thought was right. Some were harassed, threatened, and fired from their jobs for failing to convict.
The Night Before
That evening, about 150 people calling themselves the Committee on Safety met to plan their response. The name was deliberately chosen—it evoked the revolutionary committees that had organized resistance to British rule a century earlier. They were casting themselves as patriots defending their community against a foreign threat.
The next morning, an advertisement appeared in local newspapers:
Rise, people of New Orleans! Alien hands of oath-bound assassins have set the blot of a martyr's blood upon your vaunted civilization! Your laws, in the very Temple of Justice, have been bought off...
Citizens were called to gather at the statue of Henry Clay, near the prison. They were told to "come prepared for action."
The Lynching
As thousands of demonstrators assembled, the Italian consul in New Orleans, Pasquale Corte, desperately sought help from Louisiana's governor, Francis Nicholls. The governor declined to act without a request from Mayor Shakspeare.
The mayor had gone out to breakfast. He could not be reached.
At the Clay statue, attorney William Parkerson addressed the crowd. He called for the people of New Orleans to "set aside the verdict of that infamous jury, every one of whom is a perjurer and a scoundrel." When he finished, the crowd marched to the prison, chanting "We want the Dagoes."
Inside the prison, warden Lemuel Davis heard the mob breaking down the door with a battering ram. He made a decision that may have been merciful or may have been cowardly: he released the nineteen Italian prisoners from their cells and told them to hide as best they could.
The mob that gathered outside numbered in the thousands—a spontaneous outpouring of rage and hatred. But the actual killings were carried out by a much smaller group, a disciplined "execution squad" of perhaps a few dozen men. They were led by Parkerson and three other city leaders: Walter Denegre, a lawyer; James Houston, a politician and businessman; and John Wickliffe, editor of the New Delta newspaper.
The lynch mob included men who would go on to distinguished careers. John Parker was later elected Louisiana's 37th governor. Walter Flower became the 44th mayor of New Orleans.
They found Emmanuele Polizzi, the mentally ill man whose inadmissible confession had been the prosecution's most damning evidence. They dragged him outside, hanged him from a lamppost, and shot him. Antonio Bagnetto, a fruit peddler who had just been acquitted, was hanged from a tree and shot. Nine others were shot or clubbed to death inside the prison.
The bullet-riddled bodies of Polizzi and Bagnetto were left hanging for hours.
The Victims
Eleven men died that day. Here is what we know about some of them:
Antonio Bagnetto was a fruit peddler. He had been tried and acquitted.
James Caruso was a stevedore—a dockworker who loaded and unloaded ships. He had never been tried.
Loreto Comitis was a tinsmith. He had never been tried.
Rocco Geraci was another stevedore. He had never been tried.
Joseph Macheca was different from the others. He was American-born, a former blockade runner during the Civil War, a fruit importer, and a political boss in New Orleans's Italian community. He was, in other words, exactly the kind of successful, connected Italian that made the city's elite uncomfortable.
The list goes on. Fruit peddlers and dockworkers, a shoemaker who lived on the wrong street, a man who visited the wrong shop. Some had been acquitted. Some had never been tried. None had been convicted of anything.
The Aftermath
American press coverage of the lynching was largely congratulatory. The mob had done what the courts had failed to do, the argument went. Justice had been served.
Those responsible for the killings were never charged. Their identities were not secret—Parkerson and the other leaders had organized the event publicly, addressed the crowd by name, and led the march to the prison. But no prosecutor would bring charges, no grand jury would indict.
The incident had serious national and international repercussions. The Italian consul left New Orleans in May 1891 at his government's direction. Italy cut off diplomatic relations with the United States. There were genuine rumors of war between the two countries.
The New York Times, in a lengthy statement, charged city politicians with responsibility for the lynching. This was unusual—the Times was not known for defending unpopular immigrant groups against the American establishment.
The diplomatic crisis was eventually resolved when the United States paid an indemnity to the families of the Italian nationals who had been killed. But the damage to Italian-American communities was lasting. The incident intensified calls for immigration restrictions. Anti-Italian prejudice, already common, became more virulent and more mainstream.
And the word "Mafia" entered the American vocabulary. Before 1891, most Americans had never heard the term. After New Orleans, it became shorthand for Italian criminality—a stereotype that would shape how Italian immigrants were perceived for generations.
The Question of Who Killed Hennessy
So who actually murdered David Hennessy?
The honest answer is that we don't know. The trial failed to establish guilt. The subsequent federal investigation found the evidence "exceedingly unsatisfactory." The main witness to the dying declaration was never called to testify, which suggests that either his testimony wouldn't have held up under cross-examination or that prosecutors had reasons not to put him on the stand.
It's possible that members of the Matranga family or their associates killed Hennessy to prevent him from testifying against them. It's possible that the Provenzanos arranged it. It's possible that someone entirely unconnected to the Italian community committed the murder and the "dagos" identification was either fabricated or misheard.
What we do know is that the roundup of Italian suspects was based on ethnicity, not evidence. We know that the trial produced no convictions despite intense pressure to convict. We know that prominent citizens then organized a mob to murder the acquitted defendants and those who had never even been tried.
And we know that the perpetrators faced no consequences.
The Larger Pattern
Lynching was not uncommon in late nineteenth-century America. The Tuskegee Institute documented 3,446 lynchings of Black Americans and 1,297 lynchings of white Americans between 1882 and 1968, with the peak occurring in the 1890s. The New Orleans lynching fits into this broader pattern of extrajudicial violence—but with some distinctive features.
Most lynchings were carried out by anonymous mobs in rural areas. The New Orleans lynching was organized by named city leaders, advertised in newspapers, and carried out in broad daylight in a major metropolitan area. The victims were not isolated individuals but a group held in the custody of the state. The stated justification was not the usual lynching pretexts—alleged rape or assault—but dissatisfaction with a jury verdict.
In other words, this was a lynching of people the legal system had just declared innocent, organized by lawyers and politicians and newspaper editors, conducted in public as a civic event.
The message was clear: for certain people, acquittal was not protection. The courts were just one system of justice. When the courts failed to deliver the right verdict, the community would deliver its own.
Echoes
The 1891 New Orleans lynching became the subject of a 1999 HBO film called Vendetta, starring Christopher Walken and based on a 1977 history book of the same name by Richard Gambino. The story has been revisited periodically, usually in discussions of anti-Italian prejudice or the history of lynching in America.
But perhaps its most relevant echo is in the broader American struggle over who belongs. The Italian immigrants of 1891 were brought to Louisiana to work. They were legally white but socially suspect. They faced accusations of criminality, clannishness, and divided loyalty. They were told they lacked the qualities that make good citizens.
Within a generation or two, their descendants were simply white Americans. The prejudice faded. The ethnic slurs fell out of use. Italian-Americans became governors and mayors—including in New Orleans itself.
But the mechanisms of exclusion didn't disappear. They found new targets. The question of who gets to be American, who gets the benefit of the doubt from police and prosecutors and juries, who gets to be seen as an individual rather than a representative of a suspect group—these questions remain with us.
The eleven men who died on March 14, 1891, were not convicted of any crime. Several had just been acquitted. Others had never been charged. They died because they were Italian, because a police chief had been murdered and someone had to pay, because the city's elite decided that the legal system's verdict was unacceptable.
Their killers became governors and mayors. Their killers were never charged.
That, too, is part of American history.