Description
Book SynopsisIn the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, tens of thousands of Southern Italians and Sicilians emigrated to the American Gulf South. Jessica Barbata Jackson shows that these newcomers used their undefined status to become racially transient, moving among and between racial groups as both “white southerners” and “people of color”.
Trade ReviewBooks such as
Dixie's Italians reinforce my love and respect for my paternal and maternal grandparents, who emigrated migrated from my ancestral home of Cefalu, Sicily. They left Sicily hoping to give their families a better way of life in a strange land, whose people then committed vile acts against them and others from Sicily. Jessica Jackson remembers five of them, lynched in 1899 Tallulah, Louisiana, and two who were lynched in 1901 in Mississippi.