I just hung out my Italian flag to honor Columbus Day today. In view of what South San Francisco's city council did back on Aug. 26th cancelling the observance of the day, I wanted to register my protest on my porch and on the Voice. There is a famous arm movement used by Italian drivers, especially in Rome, that applies here in my opinion. But let's just review some of the history that myopic public officials are trying to cancel. From today's Wall Street Journal piece by Alessandra Bocchi
Columbus Day became a national holiday in the U.S. in 1968 thanks in part to the lobbying efforts of Italian-Americans. Italian immigrants, most of whom came from Naples and Sicily, faced severe discrimination in the 19th century. “They were heavily exploited, and in some instances they were paid less than ‘white’ and ‘colored’ labor—for instance in the work on New York’s Croton Reservoir,” says Seton Hall historian William Connell, author of “The Routledge History of Italian Americans.”
That wasn’t the worst of it. In 1899 the New York Sun described the “unwritten law of the south,” under which “white men could not be lynched—with the exception of the Italian.” Italian-Americans were the target of the biggest lynching in American history, in New Orleans in 1891. After the police chief of New Orleans was shot, hundreds of Sicilian immigrants were rounded up without cause, and nine were tried for murder. The jury acquitted them, but Mayor Joseph A. Shakespeare organized a mob of between 8,000 and 20,000, which stormed the prison and murdered the nine men and two other Sicilians who were held for unrelated charges.
A future president was among those cheering on the mob. “Personally I think it rather a good thing,” Theodore Roosevelt wrote to his sister. The New York Times editorialized: “These sneaking and cowardly Sicilians, the descendants of bandits and assassins . . . are to us a pest without mitigations.”
In 1925 the Ku Klux Klan opposed an effort to erect a statue of Columbus in Richmond, Va. The Klan lost the argument, and the monument was dedicated in December 1927.
So the South San Francisco council stands with the KKK and numerous other racists. Frankly the ones who voted to do this should resign in disgrace. They probably wouldn't try to drive to the East Bay without GPS and Waze never mind get in a little ship and sail to the end of the earth where common belief said they would fall off. Basta.
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