Following in the footsteps of prominenti such as Carlo Barsotti, Generoso Pope purchased Il Progresso Italo-Americano in 1928 for a little more than $2 million. He proceeded to amass an impressive media empire of newspapers and radio stations, including purchasing New York City’s Bolletino della Sera and WHOM, using these instruments to exhort Italians to learn English, naturalize, and register to vote.1 Although Pope’s stature increased within the community and city, over the next few decades the importance of the Italian language press lessened. With immigration restriction preventing a new influx of Italians, along with a maturing second and third generation, the vital role played by Italian language newspapers grew more unnecessary for predominantly English-speaking Italian American communities.
Although the Italian American embrace of whiteness had been well under way, the interwar period expedited the process.2 In the 1920s and 1930s, Benito Mussolini’s Fascist regime in Italy, his colonial expansionism, and the impact of Fascism on the Italian American community emboldened Italian American assertions of whiteness.3 Community leaders, Italian Americans generally, and major Italian American dailies trumpeted the glory of Fascism and Mussolini, spurred on by the widespread admiration that Mussolini won among Americans. Fascism solidified the process of community formation among Italian Americans that had begun earlier, giving Italian Americans symbols of pride and self-confidence that they had previously lacked. Similar to mainstream newspapers during the period 1910 through 1920, Mussolini and Fascism reinforced Italian notions of civilization and provided Italian Americans a sense of pride in their race.
Nationalist rhetoric was highly charged with racial overtones that justified the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935–1936 as an attempt to “civilize” that country, as well as to avenge the Italian defeat at Adowa in 1896. The Italian invasion, generally considered the high point of Italian popular consensus behind Mussolini, sparked protests within black communities in the United States. In response, Italian Americans defended their national image and communities against what they now perceived as African militancy in the United States.4 Much of this occurred in northern cities such as New York, where large numbers of Italian Americans and African Americans lived in close proximity. Informed by a militant nationalism based on imperialism and race, Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia imbued Italians in America with a sense of racial and ethnic uplift on the backs of people of color.
The United States’ entry into World War II in 1941 remains one of the seminal moments in Italian American history. Just as previous wars had done for other marginalized groups, World War II offered second-generation Italian Americans a chance to prove their undivided loyalty. Faced with this opportunity, they volunteered and served in the U.S. armed forces in great numbers—perhaps as many as 200,000 from New York alone.5 Italian Americans’ exposure to people of various ethnicities, as well as being stationed in different states or countries, began to loosen ties to their communities. In effect, the war greatly accelerated the assimilation of all ethnic groups, especially Italians.6 However, with America now at war with Italy, and with the federal government’s designation of 600,000 Italian resident aliens as “enemy aliens,” the stigma of being un-American still had not fully disappeared. Now, subject to restrictions and regulations, Italian enemy aliens had to register and obtain identification booklets complete with fingerprints and photographs. Government posters urging Italian Americans “not to speak the enemy’s language—speak American,” as well as signs in the windows of ethnic businesses promising “no Italian spoken for duration of war,” underscored the level of mistrust and fear of Italian Americans. One outcome of this trend was a 40 percent decrease in broadcasting in immigrant languages between 1942 and 1948. Although President Franklin D. Roosevelt removed Italians from the list of enemy aliens in October 1942, Italian Americans did suffer some damage to their morale and integrity. The fact that government documents in 1942 described the complexion of Italian resident aliens as “dark” and “swarthy” suggests the degree to which Italian American whiteness remained fluid. However, with wartime participation and the eventual shedding of enemy alien status, Italian American status slowly improved.7
The interaction between Italian Americans and African Americans after World War II came within the context of a changing America. Emerging from the Great Depression and World War II, and buoyed by government programs such as the GI Bill, many Italian Americans acquired college degrees and, along with millions of other, predominantly white, Americans, flocked to suburban housing developments. For those who stayed in the old neighborhoods, federal and state housing programs designed to offer low-income populations better housing increased the number of African American residents and served as a convenient scapegoat for what appeared to them as declining neighborhoods. By the 1960s, white ethnic hostility toward civil rights militancy, a deteriorating war in Vietnam, government antipoverty measures and programs such as school busing, and a stagnating economy informed what has become known as the white ethnic backlash.
In New York City, Mario Procaccino, the Democratic candidate for mayor in 1969, provided a case study through which to further understand this shift toward pan-ethnic whiteness and victimization. As African Americans and liberal opponents deemed Procaccino’s rhetoric racist and reactionary, the Italian-born Procaccino appeared perplexed and frustrated over these attacks. On the campaign trail in Harlem, Procaccino replied to a critic, “I know what discrimination means…. I’ve suffered as much as any of you.”8 Despite suffering hardship as an Italian immigrant, Procaccino, like many other Italian Americans by this period, remained unwilling to recognize or admit the benefits received through whiteness.9 Ignoring their own reliance on governmental assistance during the New Deal and after World War II, many working-class Italian Americans viewed Great Society programs as unnecessary and unfair “handouts” to African Americans funded by white working-class tax dollars. Instead, Italian Americans created an ethnic myth whereby European immigrant achievement resulted solely from hard work. Saturated in racially informed stereotypes, African Americans emerged as the polar opposite to this immigrant success story. Certainly, Italian Americans did not hold a monopoly on hostility toward African Americans during this period. Policies such as busing and quotas served as further evidence to white ethnics, in general, that their histories remained free of the sort of government handouts so maligned and connected in their minds with blackness. In many ways, by the 1960s and 1970s, Italian Americans had fully distanced themselves from a past of racial inbetweeness.
On June 22, 1982, only thirteen years after Mario Procaccino ran for mayor of New York City, a mob of Italian American teenagers murdered Willie Turks, an African American transit worker, in Gravesend, Brooklyn. At the sentencing of the four convicted murderers, Judge Sybil Hart Kooper stated in disgust, “There was a lynch mob on Avenue X that night. The only thing missing was a rope and a tree.” The Turks murder would be the first of three high-profile murders involving Italian American youths and African Americans in the 1980s. The killing of Michael Griffith in Howard Beach, Queens, in 1986 and the killing of Yusef Hawkins in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, three years later exposed to the nation what appeared to be a long-simmering fear of, and aversion to, African Americans. Following Hawkins’s killing on August 23, 1989, protesters filled the streets of Bensonhurst, seeking justice for a heinous racial crime. Hawkins had been shot by a mob of Italian American boys “protecting” their turf from a perceived invader. As African Americans marched through the streets of the mostly Italian American neighborhood, they were greeted in some instances by racial taunts and displays of watermelons. Although not all Italian Americans condoned or engaged in this type of bigotry, in the minds of many New Yorkers, these acts came to define the current relationship between Italian Americans and African Americans.10
Sadly, another incident in Howard Beach in 2005 provoked similar thoughts and uncomfortably raised many of the same issues grappled with almost twenty years earlier. On June 29, a group of white men attacked three African American men in what appeared to be a terrible hate crime. The brutal altercation left Glenn Moore in serious condition with injuries to his head, back, and legs, sustained primarily from an aluminum baseball bat wielded by nineteen-year-old Nicholas Minucci, known in the neighborhood as “Fat Nick.” According to the New York Times, Minucci told investigators that after the beating, his companion yelled at the victims, “This is what you get if you want to rob white boys.” Anthony Minucci, Nick Minucci’s uncle, defended his nephew by emphatically stating, “He’s not a racist. We’re not racists. He’s definitely not racist.” Convicted of first-degree robbery as a hate crime, Nicholas Minucci was sentenced on July 17, 2006, to fifteen years in jail. After his sentencing Minucci stated to the court that his actions had been deemed a hate crime only because of where they occurred: Howard Beach. His lawyer, Albert Gaudelli, went one step further, telling reporters outside the courtroom that “the term Howard Beach has become synonymous with racism.”11
Racial incidents pitting white Italian Americans against African Americans marred the city and relegated the relationship between Italian Americans and blacks as one of outright hostility and distance. Despite its relevance in the 1980s, the process of distancing from African Americans (people of color) was not a recent phenomenon but had emerged some seventy years earlier. Although the Italian immigrant past is replete with an understanding of what it meant to be black in American society, it would be this understanding, as well as their own darker past, that would point subsequent generations toward the once unattainable goal of whiteness. The roots of the tragic racial events in Howard Beach and Bensonhurst lie deep within the broader scope of Italian American history—a history earmarked by an uneven, complicated journey from immigrant to American in a highly racialized society.