In the antebellum south , Sicilians were actually designated as blacks
They were victims of the biggest lynching incident ever in New Orleans , when a bunch of them were rounded up and lynched because they were through to have killed a police sergeant but the general consensus that they (anglo americans) were just gung ho to lynch any Sicilian they saw
There were other incidents as well. A few years later in 1899, there was another lynching of 5 Italians in Tallulah, Lousiana over a dispute involving a goat owned by one of the victims. Three years later in 1901, two Italians were lynched in Irwin, Mississippi.
