The lynching of eleven Sicilians in New Orleans

New Orleans police chief David Hennessy was shot on Basin Street in October 1890 and died the next day. The city's press and officials immediately blamed a Sicilian conspiracy, and nineteen Italian immigrants were indicted. At the trial of the first nine in February 1891, the defence established alibis; the jury acquitted six and deadlocked on the rest.

A committee of prominent citizens called a mass meeting for the following morning, 14 March, and printed the call in the newspapers. A crowd of thousands marched on the Orleans Parish Prison, broke in, and killed eleven Italian and Sicilian men - nine shot inside the building, two dragged outside and hanged, among them the shipping magnate Joseph Macheca. Several of the dead had not even been tried.

Italy broke off diplomatic relations, and the United States eventually paid an indemnity of $25,000 while denying liability. No one in New Orleans was prosecuted; a grand jury praised the mob. The killings rested on a view of Southern Italians as a criminal race and not quite white - the same logic that was then excluding Chinese immigrants and disenfranchising Black Louisianans, applied to a different group.