President Joe Biden’s recent proclamation honoring Columbus Day was a missed opportunity to acknowledge and elaborate on one of the country’s dreadful moments and one in which Italians were the victims.
Biden’s proclamation declared Monday as the day Columbus Day will be recognized this year. Additionally, he acknowledged the importance of the day in the Italian American community, emphasizing that “for many Italian Americans, the story of Christopher Columbus’ voyage crossing the Atlantic from the Spanish port of Palos de la Frontera on behalf of Queen Isabella I and King Ferdinand II remains a source of pride.”
Biden should be applauded for such comments. He fell short in several areas, however. First, he didn’t admit the importance Columbus played in the history of human civilization. That most likely has to do with the contemporary controversy surrounding the holiday among many sociopolitical left-wing activists and their unhinged hatred for a man who died nearly 500 years before any of them were born. If Biden had been braver, he would have celebrated Columbus’s discovery in his proclamation and how it changed the course of human history.
Next, Biden fell short in the proclamation when he briefly discussed the founding of Columbus Day but ignored the details of the event that motivated the holiday’s inclusion in the nation’s culture.
“Columbus Day was founded by President Benjamin Harrison in 1892 in response to the horrific, xenophobic attack that took the lives of 11 Italian Americans the year before,” Biden said. “In the face of hate, Italian Americans persisted — advancing our Nation and challenging us to live up to our highest values.”
It was good that Biden recognized the hate crime that resulted in the murder of 11 Italian Americans at the hands of an angry mob in New Orleans. It was bad that he did not go into more detail — especially since what happened in 1891 in Louisiana is considered one of the largest mass lynchings in American history, and the victims were targeted because of their Italian ethnicity. Lamenting decades-old discriminatory grievances is the metaphorical bread and butter of Biden’s sociopolitical platform. Yet, Biden merely glossed over this hate crime.
On March 14, 1891, a lynch mob, fueled by anti-Italian sentiment, broke into a jail with a battering ram and attacked Italian American immigrants believed to have been involved in the killing of a local police chief — suspects who were found not guilty by a court due to lack of evidence, according to the Library of Congress. The mayor stoked the discriminatory sentiment, calling those believed to be involved “Sicilian gangsters.” The mob “dragged them from their cells and lynched them.”
“Sicilians were viewed by many Americans as culturally backward and racially suspect,” historian Manfred Berg wrote about the incident. Law enforcement officials also profiled them because of suspected Mafia connections. Some of the largest publications in the country expressed such negative and discriminatory sentiments.
An editorial written a few days after the event in the New York Times celebrated the violence and lynchings, labeling the victims as “desperate ruffians and murderers. These sneaking and cowardly Sicilians, the descendants of bandits and assassins … are to us a pest without mitigations.”
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Given Biden’s history, it is a logical assumption that had the victims been from an ethnic group that was nonwhite, he would have elaborated more on what happened and called the “xenophobic attack” for what it was — a lynching. However, doing so would also mean acknowledging that lynchings, including one considered to be among the largest in the nation’s history, occurred against people of European descent and racial minorities. And, one can presume from today’s political climate within the Democratic Party that having to admit hate crimes occurred against white people is not something they want to do.
This is speculative, of course. However, facts seem to support such a hypothesis. And, considering that the murders in New Orleans were the main determining factors for the Columbus Day holiday, Biden should have given it the attention that he would have had the victims been a racial minority.