Do you even know why we celebrate Columbus Day?

The biggest mass lynching in U.S. history was committed against Italian immigrants in New Orleans in retaliation for the murder of an Irish police chief. That’s probably not what comes to mind when you think “lynching,” but it’s a fact. Although the vast majority of lynching victims in American history were black, a small but not-insignificant percentage were not. The glittering surface of America’s “Gilded Age” — roughly 1880 to 1910 — served as cover for the dark underbelly of the era: rising white nationalism, explosive growth of the Ku Klux Klan, racial pseudoscience (genteely described as “eugenics”), and mob terror — certainly against African-Americans, but also anyone deemed not quite white. It was also a time of extreme wealth inequality — the Tech Titans of the era were called “Robber Barons” for a reason. Industrial fat cats and their political allies knew that the best way to keep voters from noticing the real source of their problems was to find a scapegoat — preferably one with dark skin and a foreign language and religion. On the West Coast, Chinese immigrants would have to suffice. Everywhere else, bronze-skinned immigrants, mostly from Italy, made the perfect whipping boys.

This is a “Know-Nothing” flag from the mid-1800s. The Know-Nothing movement was the 19th century’s Alt-Right. This image might be confusing to some, so I’ll clarify: Yes, some white people — who, in the grand scheme of the ten-thousand-year timeline of the human species, arrived in North America five minutes ago — considered themselves “Native Americans.” And yes, their Ns are backwards, and I don’t suspect it was done on purpose. It’s too bad these people so much time fretting over foreigners instead of being “influenced” by some schoolbooks.

Apparently, this Know-Nothing flag’s designer has a great-great-grandson who is also politically active.

Anyway, by the end of the 19th century, communities of Catholic immigrants from Ireland and Southern Europe had sprung up in the old South. They became the new urban underclass, especially as black workers, fed up with Jim Crow and wise to the growing influence of the KKK, departed for the North. By 1890, New Orleans’ renowned French Quarter had been nicknamed “Little Sicily.” Ethnic resentment against Italians simmered — not just among Southern good ol’ boys, but also second-generation Irish immigrants, who were the previous generation’s hate objects. Sadly, instead of empathizing with newcomers, it’s common for yesterday’s out-group to breathe a sigh of relief that someone else is now the lowest man on the totem pole. Politicians know it, and they exploit it, as this political cartoon from the era shows. Blacks, Irishmen, Germans, and Scandinavians came together to “Build the Wall” in order to keep out Chinese immigrants, culminating in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.

On October 15, 1890, New Orleans’ respected Police Chief, David Hennessy, was shot by unknown gunmen as he walked home. Hennessy remained conscious and alert in the hospital, where he received several visitors — not only colleagues from the police force, but friends and family. After Hennessy’s death the next morning, Captain William O’Connor suddenly remembered Hennessy revealing his assassins’ identity the night before, “I’ll tell you who did it. Dagoes.”

No one questioned why Hennessy had not revealed this information to anybody else. And anyhow, the story was suspect from the start: Hennessy and his family had been targets of violence before, but not from immigrants. His Irish-born father had been murdered by fellow policeman, Arthur Guerin, a white Louisiana native. In 1882, Hennessy killed his rival for Police Chief, Thomas Devereaux, in an act of self-defense. Like Guerin, Devereaux was “old Louisiana,” a member of the white Southern-Cajun plantation class. Although Hennessy was acquitted of his murder, it no doubt inflamed resentments.

Regardless, Italians had recently replaced the Irish as the lowest class of immigrants on the totem pole. The conditions were just right for the media to gin up nativist violence. Sounding like a Gilded Age version of the Daily Stormer, the Louisiana Democrat called for mob justice against the “band of “dagoes” involved in the “bloodthirsty assassination” of Police Chief David Hennessy: “The Crescent City should move in the matter and find the guilty parties, then hang them.”

After nearly five months of incitement, a mob took matters into its own hands on March 14, 1891, storming the city jail where 19 Italian men were still detained. Seven had already been tried and acquitted of Hennessy’s murder, but were still imprisoned on “conspiracy” charges that prosecutors handed down months later. Investigators had tried, and failed, to prove that these helpless immigrants — among them fruit peddlers and shoemakers — had ties to organized crime. (Thanks to the incessant media drumbeat, the word “mafia” had just entered the American vocabulary.)

But facts are useless in the face of mass hysteria. The Italians never had a chance.

Inside the prison, as the mob was breaking down the door with a battering ram, prison warden Lemuel Davis let the 19 Italian prisoners out of their cells and told them to hide as best they could…Although the thousands of demonstrators outside for the lynching were a spontaneous outburst, the killings were carried out by a relatively small, disciplined “execution squad” within the mob, led by Parkerson and three other city leaders: Walter Denegre, lawyer; James D. Houston, politician and businessman; and John C. Wickliffe, editor of the New Delta newspaper. Other members of the lynch mob included John M. Parker, who was elected as Louisiana’s 37th governor, and Walter C. Fowler, who was elected as the 44th mayor of New Orleans.

Eleven men were gunned down. The vigilantes hung the bullet-ridden bodies from trees in a public square in celebration, where they remained for hours. Two victims, including a mentally disabled street vendor, were hung from lamp posts, then shot. Eight were lucky enough to escape, including 14-year-old Gaspare Marchesi. His father, Antonio, died from gunshot wounds inside the jail. The father-son pair had already been tried for Hennessy’s murder and acquitted on all charges.

Newspapers celebrated the gruesome attack — and not just in the South.

Times sure have changed. The same American media elites who applauded the racist mob murders are now pushily demanding all of America stop celebrating the holiday created in response. Columbus Day was an idea dreamed up by an Italian newspaper editor in Colorado, who thought it was a brilliant tactic for pushing back against racial pseudoscience and white nativism. As the turn-of-the-century immigration wave hit its peak, eugenics were all the rage among the Ivy League and the old Protestant elite, who still controlled business and politics. They were beside themselves over the flood of low-IQ “Latin” people arriving from Southern Europe. (Apparently, back in the day, “Latin” was a race.) They were very worried about Italians, especially dark-skinned Sicilians, spreading their inferior genes and culture throughout America. Italians were believed to have astoundingly low IQs, averaging only about 75 points.

Of course, at the very same time, universities were teaching the ancient wisdom of Roman and Greek philosophers — with no sense of irony whatsoever. Plus, it was commonly accepted at the time that Christopher Columbus, commissioned by the Spanish king, had “discovered” America in 1492. Columbus was revered as a brilliant navigator and a man who single-handedly altered the course of human history. Despite working for the Spanish government, Columbus himself was not Spanish. He was Italian — just as Italian as the fruit sellers and factory workers who had just been gunned down like a pack of stray dogs in New Orleans.

Columbus Day had little to do with Columbus the man. It almost certainly had nothing to do with celebrating his crimes against Native Americans. It was about acknowledging this maligned nationality’s contributions to history. It was Italian-Americans’ way of standing up to racist claims about their “innate” inferiority, essentially saying: “We’re genetically inferior? If it weren’t for one of us, you’d still be trying to find a direct route to the Spice Islands without falling of the Earth, which, let’s not forget, your ancestors thought was flat.” Italian immigrants celebrated Columbus Day for the first time in 1892, a year after the mass lynching in New Orleans. The first state to observe Columbus Day was Colorado in 1906, thanks largely to the work of an immigrant who founded the state’s first Italian newspaper.

The holiday had nothing to do with celebrating genocide, or “ignoring the pain of Native Americans,” as Barack Obama has charged. It had everything to do with “Italian-Americans struggling against religious and ethnic discrimination in the United States…many in the community saw celebrating the life and accomplishments of Christopher Columbus as a way for Italian Americans to be accepted by the mainstream,” according to NPR.

Yes, most grown-ups know that the real Christopher Columbus was not the cartoonish figure they learned about in picture books. As a friend of mine wrote on Facebook, “Columbus Day is really not about lionizing Columbus the man per se, but about commemorating the first domino to fall in the founding of the United States of America: the first significant European contact with North America.” He then sarcastically noted, “I am certainly very impressed by your knowledge that Christopher Columbus wasn’t a 15th-century Mother Teresa, and also that you all see through the illusions of your first-grade civics textbook’s version of Columbus — what wise seekers of truth you all must be!”

I wish. Before jumping on the latest hashtag cause of the week, take some time to find out the true story. It’s likely to come up again, when the the next round of immigrants is on the verge of being accepted into mainstream America and is under assault for clinging to their dignity when they were yesterday’s out-group. As my grandmother used to say, the truth will out itself. It will also set you free.