Italians represented the largest single group of immigrants in America at the beginning of the 20th century, with more than four million coming to this country between 1880 and 1920. The majority of Italians came from southern Italy to escape the poverty, disease, and famine that had consumed the region. Dark-haired, dark-eyed and olive-skinned, these southern Italians tested America’s developing racial order during a period when socio-economic power was held by fair-skinned people of northern European descent.
American nativism, a political movement that favored the interests of indigenous inhabitants over those of immigrants, was on the rise in the early 20th century. Nativists fanned the flames of anti-Italian sentiment by pointing out the southern Italian’s in-between color – not black, not white, and not brown – as a threat to the purity of the white race.
In 1911, the U.S. Immigration Commission’s Dictionary of People and Races divided humankind into five principal varieties, based strictly on skin color: American (red), Caucasian (white), Ethiopian (black), Malay (brown), and Mongolian (yellow). Although every Italian newcomer checked off the box marked “white” on immigration papers, federal government naturalization forms also required applicants to provide their race.
Italians accounted for about 10 percent of the ethnic heritage of all foreign-born population by 1910. Their growing numbers frustrated anti-foreign sentiment, and fueled attempts by nativists to portray Italians as non-whites. Edward Ross, a prominent social scientist of the period, publicly ruminated on southern Italian “Negroid” roots, pointing out Sicily’s proximity to Africa and the centuries of political and social influence by the dark-skinned Moors.
In his essay, “No Color Barrier,” Thomas Guglielmo refers to a series of popular magazine articles written by Ross warning that southern Italians were not fit for U.S. citizenship because of their “strong dose of African Blood.” The racial link between Italians and African-Americans obviously penetrated some levels of American society, since lynchings, a punishment often associated only with African-Americans, also occurred against Italians during this period. On the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives, they debated the question of Italian “whiteness.” Guglielmo writes that in 1911 the House Committee on Immigration seriously questioned whether “one should regard the south Italian as a full-blooded Caucasian.”
In the end, Congress failed to deny naturalization rights to Italians, but they did establish immigration restrictions on southern and eastern Europeans in 1924. Although the new Italian immigrants faced social and political discrimination when they arrived in America in the early 20th century, the efforts of nativists to portray them as black did not succeed. The Italians maintained their status as “white” and never faced the systematic exclusions and discrimination of African-Americans.