Let’s set aside technology and policy for a moment, and talk about America. In 1891 a mob broke into a New Orleans prison and lynched eleven men who had just been found not guilty on a murder charge. It’s not an unfamiliar tale in the Jim Crow South, except the eleven victims weren’t African-Americans. 

They were Italian immigrants, part of an American population who had been targets of discrimination since arriving on our shores in large numbers since the 1870’s.  Yet a year later Italian-Americans themselves had found a role model and symbol with which to identify themselves, and to assert their determination to succeed in America despite the odds.