A Private Message
“Racism is a virus that quickly mutates and, instead of disappearing,
goes into hiding, and lurks in waiting.
Instances of racism continue to shame us,
for they show that our supposed social progress is
not as real or definitive as we think.”
Pope Francis
“The inoculation against racism can be summed up in one word: virtue… generosity, selflessness, trust and trustworthiness, humility,
outrage, conviction, forgiveness and, of course, mercy itself.”
San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Joseph Cordileone
A MESSAGE TO JON RYAN SCHAFFER:
Now the world knows who you and the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers and other terrorists who assaulted the Capitol on January 6 really are: Haters responsible for the deaths of Capitol police officers – you’re “cop killers,” cowards, traitors, enemies of the Constitution; cooperating with prosecutors and providing evidence for the prosecution of your coconspirators, because you’re afraid to go to prison; and some of you still hide in your mommies’ basements. Perhaps, you might learn something from History.
One-hundred-and-fifty years ago, with a population of 6,000 including just two-hundred Chinese, Los Angeles could barely be described as a city, when two Chinese businessmen began an argument over a woman that ended in the unintended shooting of a White civilian.
A White mob responded by attacking the building in which the combatant took refuge, setting-up make shift gallows and lynching eighteen innocent Chinese men trapped in the area.
In August 1918, John Meints of Minesota was attacked, tarred and feathered by a group of masked men. He was accused of failing to buy war bonds. Prior to World War I, German was the second most widely spoken language in the U.S. and there were over 100 million first- and second-generation German-Americans living in the United States. Nonetheless, President Woodrow Wilson declared German Americans were to be treated as “alien-enemies” unless they reject their German identity. Half-a-billion dollars in German-American properties were confiscated, thousands lost their jobs and fourteen states banned teaching German, declaring it “not a fit language to teach clean and pure American boys and girls.”
In November 1917, Wilson’s ambassador to Germany James Watson Gerard told members of the Ladies Aid Society of New York’s St. Mary’s Hospital “Every citizen must declare himself American – or traitor!”
Every German-American was forced to be fingerprinted and barred from living near military facilities, airports, and port towns; approximately 6,000 were sent to internment camps, and, after the war ended 1918, some remained incarcerated until 1920. In April 2018, Robert Prager was lynched by an Illinois mob convinced he was a German spy.
In 1890, New Orleans Police Superintendent David Hennessey was shot and killed shortly before he was to testify against one of two rival groups of Italian dockworkers. As a result, Italian men were indiscriminately rounded-up and the New Orleans Times Democrat reported, “The little jail was crowded with Sicilians, whose low, receding foreheads, repulsive countenances and slovenly attire proclaimed their brutal nature.”
Following the verdict, The Daily States advocated mob action to “remedy” the “failure” of “justice”: “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, and suborners have caused to be turned loose upon your streets the midnight murderers of David C. Hennessy, in whose premature grave the very majesty of our American law lies buried….”
On March 14, 1891, The Times Democrat ran an advertisement that read, “All good citizens are invited to attend a mass meeting… to remedy the failure of justice.” Some of the city’s leading citizens lead a large mob that stormed the parish prison, shot nine men as they cowered in their cells, then dragged out and hanged two more – despite the fact that nine had been acquitted the day before and two had not even been charged with a crime.
A Southern newspaper joyfully announced that “a wild mob numbered by the thousands avenge[d] the murder of Chief Hennessy” and “the wretched Sicilian band [had been] butchered.”
The Italians were simply working-class immigrants - dockworkers, cobblers, fruit vendors, and tinsmiths, ordinary immigrants who came to America looking for a better life for themselves and their families. Yet, American newspapers vilified them as monsters worthy of mob violence, reflecting the mainstream belief that Italians were savages and natural-born criminals, more loyal to the Pope than to the United States. In the American South, these olive-skinned immigrants were as worthy of being lynched with impunity as if they were African American.
Two days after the lynching, the The New York Times published an editorial: “The New Orleans Affair” – “Nor can there be any doubt that the mob’s victims were desperate ruffians and murderers. 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.”
[A SPECIAL NOTE TO THOSE WHO DON’T KNOW THE HISTORY:
In response to protests by the Italian government, President Benjamín Harrison, a man noted for his personal integrity and sense of decency, who recognized that Italians faced bigotry and institutionalized discrimination, agreed to pay the families of each of the lynched men $25,000 - approximately $705,000 in 2020 - and to publicly recognize the contributions of Italians and Italian Americans. He wanted to make clear to Americans and to the racist editors at The New York Times that lynching was unacceptable anywhere in the United States.
Harrison settled on issuing a Presidential Proclamation honoring a prominent Italian with a history of unquestionable contributions. From a list of luminaries compiled by his staff, he settled on Christopher Columbus, who – four-hundred years earlier – made shore in the Americas.
In response and following the example of France after the Civil War, Italy gifted New York City with a statue of the explorer to be delivered for the celebratory event and unveiled on October 13, 1892 at “The Circle” of Central Park South – now known as Columbus Circle. What Harrison had planned as a one-time holiday proved to be a bold affirmation of the dignity of Italian identity in the United States – an expression of Italian American pride that, in reality, has little to do with the man who sailed the ocean blue.]
Sadly, “lynching” is as old at the American Revolution.
The term traces back to Virginia Quakers and planters Charles and William Lynch; Charles headed an informal tribunal that punished British loyalists during the war and pressured Congress to pass legislation that exonerated him of wrongdoing while he headed the court – thus the term “Lynch Laws.” Because neither brother (or their tribunals) appears to have taken the law into their own hands to punish people who wronged them, there is little evidence that they ever killed anyone. The term earned its more sinister meaning in the 1800s and is predominantly associated with the Jim Crow Deep South and the murder – not necessarily by hanging - of Black men by White mobs.
The Naturalization Act of 1870 designated Asians as permanent aliens and prohibited them for voting and serving on juries – making it virtually impossible for all Asians to participate in America’s legal and political systems. Subsequent efforts by the Asiatic Exclusion League in Western states focused on ending Japanese immigration, paving the way for systemic hostility and discrimination against Japanese immigrants and Japanese-American citizens.
With Pearl Harbor, Americans of Japanese descent were quickly painted as “the enemy.” Under President Franklin Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066, 117,000 Japanese-Americans – 66,000 of them U.S. citizens - were forced into ten internment camps scattered through California and five other Western states; Almost two-thousand died of various causes.
At the same time, more than 33,000 Japanese-Americans served with distinction in the U.S. military and more than eight-hundred were killed in action, many as the famed 442nd Regimental Combat Team fought its way up the Italian Peninsula and across Southern France. At the same time,
The rise of Japanese automobile, heavy equipment and electronic industries in the decades between 1960 and the early 1990s gave rise a new wave of “Japan bashing.”
Cuban political exiles began emigrating to the U.S. in 1823 and exiles fought on the American side during the Spanish-American War of 1898; and during the late 1920s Miami was a base to plot the overthrow of the ruling dictatorship. More than 215,000 arrived in South Florida in the years immediately after Castro’s 1959 revolution and, in approximately six months in 1980, 125,000 more arrived from the Cuban port of Mariel. The 2010 census recorded 1,241,685 Cuban Americans with 983,147 born in Cuba.
In the ‘60s and ‘80s new immigrants from the island were confronted with signs and bumper stickers asking “Will the last real American leaving Miami please bring the flag.”
The second resurgence of the Klu Klux Klan during the decade following World War I moved beyond Blacks and targeted Catholics, Jews and other foreigners, including Greeks, who were easily identified by their clothing and accents. Hate-filled speeches were followed by attacks on Greek businesses, crosses burned on Greek lawns and the murders of Greek immigrants.
The Nebraska “Greek Town Riot” of 1909 was precipitated by the arrest of a Greek immigrant for being in the company of his English teacher, a young White woman. (Greeks were not considered White-skinned.) He subsequently killed the arresting officer and, after a mass meeting in which citizens were whipped into a frenzy by two state representatives, 1,000 to 3,000 rioters descended on the Greek community, looting homes and businesses, beating men, women and children and burning down every building in the area. One Greek boy was killed and the town’s entire Greek population fled.
In 1965, Archbishop Iakovos of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of North and South America was the only religious leader who had the courage to walk hand-in-hand with Martin Luther King during the famous march in Selma. Years later, he reflected on his reasons for helping American Blacks and all Americans – by birth or immigration - achieve their civil rights:
“I was not born in the United States, to live and enjoy democracy. I came to the United States from Turkey, where I was a third category citizen.
So, when Martin Luther King Jr. had his walk to the courthouse
of Selma, Alabama, I decided to join him. I said, ’This is my turn to take revenge against all those who oppress people.’ Upon my return someone called me ‘prodotis’ - traitor. Some others that I should be ashamed for what I had done. Some that I am not an American. Some that I am not a Christian.
I know that civil rights and human rights continues to be the most thorny issue in our nation, but I will stand for both rights - civil and
human rights as long as I live.
I feel it’s the Christian duty and the duty of a man who was born as a slave.”
Perhaps, just perhaps, a Greek immigrant – “a man who was born as a slave” – has much to teach terrorists and traitors who hide in their mommies’ basements and are now turning on each other because they are afraid of going to prison for what they claim to value and believe.