Like Haitian Americans today, Italian Americans were attacked for coming to the United States more than a century ago looking for a better life, Jen A. Miller writes. (Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)
When right-wing politicians and their followers launched a hate campaign against Haitian migrants living in Springfield, Ohio, the results were vile — but not unfamiliar.
The words deployed are not unlike rants used against Italian Americans who came to the U.S. in the late 1800s and early 1900s. I know this because my great-grandparents were part of a previous immigrant class that changed the face of this country, and at the time were hated for it.
I am one of the 18 million Italian Americans currently living in the United States. We make up 14.52% of New Jersey’s population, third in statewide percentage after Connecticut and Rhode Island.
An Italian immigrant family on a ferry, leaving Ellis Island in 1905. (Photo by Lewis Wickes Hine, courtesy of the Library of Congress)
My family’s story is similar to that of other descendants of the 4 million Italians who immigrated here from 1880 to 1924. I’m here because my great-grandfather did what most immigrants to the U.S. do: He was looking for a better life.
Severino Verzella crossed the Atlantic in 1911. He got married to my great-grandmother Giuseppina, also an Italian immigrant, and they settled down in Midland, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Pittsburgh, so he could work in a steel mill. He gave himself and his family a foothold by doing the hard work that not many others wanted to do. Severino did all this by immigrating legally, just as Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, have.
And, like they are now, he was attacked for it. Political cartoons depicted Italians as dark, menacing, and something to be dealt with. One, currently in the Italian American Museum of Los Angeles, depicted three Italians in a tree being cut down by a member of the Ku Klux Klan, with the caption “THE TREE MUST COME DOWN.”
There were also no consequences for hate. In 1891, 11 Italians were lynched in New Orleans, one of the largest mass lynchings in American history. And then in 1920, John M. Parker, who helped organize the lynch mob, was elected governor of Louisiana.
To try to blend in, Severino cut his name down to Sam, and Giuseppina became Josephine. My mother said they never lost their accents, nor really shook free their home identity. On Severino’s naturalization form, he was listed as “white,” but on a line for “complexion,” he was described as “dark.”
His son, my grandfather, spoke often about being harassed for being Italian, despite being given two Purple Hearts for his service in World War II. Even (arguably) New Jersey’s greatest Italian American, Frank Sinatra, was called a “guinea,” “dago” and “wop.” My grandfather’s own experiences of being discriminated against, first in the Navy and then in the construction industry in Philadelphia, set who he was. Those experiences taught him compassion for those who society treated as “the other,” even as prejudice against himself and others like him waned.
Logically, you’d think that other Italian Americans would follow that path, and not volley the same kind of hate against immigrants coming in subsequent to them. But some of the most vile attacks have been launched by fellow members of the Italian American diaspora, who are either blind or willingly ignorant of their hypocrisy.
But this country is full of people who go from the oppressed to the oppressor, and turn from understanding to hate. In Philadelphia in the 1960s and ’70s, Italian and Irish Americans, under the guiding hand of Police Commissioner-turned-Mayor Frank Rizzo, joined forces to scapegoat Black people for the ills of the city. Even Sinatra went from a Kennedy Democrat to endorsing Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.
It’s so easy to join the crowd in the hopes that it won’t then turn on you, the same way that women can be misogynists even though it pushes them down. Be perfect within their barbed framework, and they won’t come for you next. It’s a fool’s errand. Because it’s just so much easier to hate than to look inside yourself and ask where does that hate come from, and do the hard work to change it.
I know so much about Severino and Giuseppina’s story because, like many second- and third-generation members of immigrant families — and a journalist — I went on a quest to find out if the family stories that have been passed down are really true. In 2021, that quest took me to Ellis Island, where I found Severino’s name on a ship manifest, but also literature about immigrants, including Ku Klux Klan brochures “Towards the Roman Catholic Hierarchy” and “Towards the Jew.”
The museum also displayed a flyer for a lecture that screamed “No Politics from Rome,” “America for Americans!” and “MOTHERS—Your Children will fall under the pernicious power of Rome if you Remain Indifferent.” There was also an image from a Klan march through Long Branch in 1924 with a quote from “The Fiery Cross,” a KKK publication that read, in part, “The vast alien immigration is, at the root, an attack upon the Protestant religion with its freedom of conscience, and is therefore a menace to American liberties.”
My grandfather was long gone by the time I got to Ellis Island, but I connected those posters with what he told me he went through, as a reminder to try to be a better person rather than do what so many have, which has been snap around and pick another target — whether that’s transgender people, those who practice non-Christian religions, women who have chosen to take any other path than one leading to marriage and babies, or another class of immigrants coming to America to do exactly what their ancestors did.
I don’t expect this piece to change the minds of people too far gone into hate. I can’t even do that in my large, rambling, extended family, where one member put Trump socks on his baby for a family Christmas party, and another supports Marjorie Taylor Greene, who, among other vile things, allegedly laughed in a 2023 House Committee on Homeland Security about an image of Haitian immigrants being whipped at the border. I don’t know how we could all be presented with the same general set of facts, and some of us swing left, and others take a hard right. But you can still choose the path of acceptance and support, instead of continuing to perpetuate such deadly hate.
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