Dixie's Italians: Sicilians, Race, and Citizenship in the Jim Crow Gulf South by Jessica Barbata Jackson

Abstract

Reviewed by: Dixie's Italians: Sicilians, Race, and Citizenship in the Jim Crow Gulf South by Jessica Barbata Jackson Tina A. Irvine Dixie's Italians: Sicilians, Race, and Citizenship in the Jim Crow Gulf South. By Jessica Barbata Jackson. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2020. Pp. xvi, 238. $45.00, ISBN 978-0-8071-7172-1.) Standing on the shoulders of scholars James R. Barrett, David R. Roediger, and Thomas Guglielmo, historian Jessica Barbata Jackson shows that the concepts of Italian Americans as "white on arrival" and as a so-called inbetween people are insufficient for understanding that group's racial and citizenship status in the Gulf South (p. 7). Arguing that Italian Americans moved and were moved back and forth across the color line in that region between 1870 and 1920, Jackson offers a new term—"racial transiency"—for analyzing the group's shifting racialization and access to citizenship in the Jim Crow era (p. 8). Through chronological case studies examining the regional media's relatively neutral attitude toward Italian immigration before 1890, the lynching of eleven Italian Americans to purportedly preserve white supremacy in 1891, efforts to privilege Italian voters while disenfranchising African Americans in 1898, struggles over Sicilian children's place in white schools in 1907, and miscegenation disputes in 1921, Jackson demonstrates the instability of the group's racialization in those years. She also concludes, similarly to the scholars who came before her, that Italian Americans in the Gulf South were increasingly understood as white citizens by the mid-1920s, as politicians and laypeople worked to solidify a binary color line. Jackson's book provides a much-needed look into the Italian American experience in the South, as previous scholarship has often focused on the urban North. She is clear that her narrative—centered primarily on Sicilian immigrants in the Gulf South—is not indicative of Italians' experience outside the region but is nevertheless useful in understanding the complexities of the Jim Crow system. Observing that studies of the South are "usually told as a story of the black/white color line," Jackson contends that her book "is also an immigration story" (p. 6). She demonstrates the vagaries of southern ideas about race, immigration, and citizenship well, examining a wide range of New Orleans newspapers, including Italian-language and African American sources, in addition to court rulings and church, census, and marriage records in Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama. Chapter 5, which explores how courts at times deemed Sicilians and other Italians as "'white' enough to unproblematically marry other 'white' Italians but racially ambiguous enough that their relationship with a black individual did not automatically prove miscegenation," is particularly strong methodologically (p. 140). Scrutinizing white, Black, and Italian southerners' marriage records and their children's subsequent racialization in the census, this chapter best reveals what Jackson calls "the crucial character of context" (p. 13). This phrase refers to her findings that Italians' ascribed and self-promoted color, race, and civic allegiance varied in time and space. Italian immigrants were sometimes criminalized for their Italian-ness or perceived nonwhiteness and sometimes not; they sometimes presented themselves as white Americans and on other occasions passed as persons of color; and their children were at times denied access to white schools because of economic competition and growing nativism. [End Page 353] Jackson's overarching argument is well reasoned, although the case-study format somewhat limits the author's ability to show change over time. Each chapter convincingly illuminates sites of Italian Americans' racialization and proves that the categorization process was neither binary nor static in the years critical to Jim Crow's formation. The book could be clearer, though, in emphasizing how the economic and political concerns of state and local actors—including Italians and their descendants—eventually shaped American understandings of the group as uniformly white. Jackson notes several instances when court decisions, media reports, and rumors expedited or derailed that trajectory, but the book could do more to show how these venues increasingly favored an interpretation of Italians as white citizens. The transition years from Italians' "racial transiency" to their position as firmly ensconced white Americans, in short, remain murky. That is a small quibble, though, for...