Between about 1910 and 1920, in Ohio – I believe Columbus or Cincinnati – a police chief was murdered. Public response was to riot, invading the “Italian section” of the city. Apparently, the rioters burned down most of the section and lynched several Italians.
Please identify where I can locate information on the incident.
Looks like 1890/91, New Philadelphia, Ohio.
UncleBill:
Many thanks. If this is not what I sought, it’s doing a wonderful impersonation.
That web site may be the source of the story of Italians lynched in Ohio (or there may have been a different but similar lynching in Ohio*), but the lynching described on that page is a reference to New Orleans, not New Philadelphia.
If you scroll to the top, you’ll see an article continuing a discussion of New Orleans from another page. One hanging sentence ends with the declaration that the murder of the police chief led to an international incident. There is, then, a break followed by more information on floods in New Orleans.
Later, at the end of an article on New Philadelphia, there is the story Uncle Bill found, ending with a notation that the U.S. paid Italy a $25,000 indemnity. Given the rather diminutive nature of New Philadelphia, I find it odd that both that village and New Orleans would each suffer the murder of a police chief and the lynching of multiple Italian nationals in the very same year (and that the Encyclopædia Britannica, which I suspect the site is copying, would have given New Philadelphia a substantial paragraph while giving New Orleans a single line).
The opening statement on that site’s Status page is
I think we have been a victim of that OCR problem. Does anyone happen to own a copy of the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica, to look up that page and see whether the error occurred in the original typesetting?
I think tomndebb is 100% on the right track. If the OCR scan did not recognise the layout (for example:)
storyA col1 storyA col2
storyA col1 storyA col2
storyA col1 storyA col2
storyB col1 storyB col2
storyB col1 storyB col2
storyB col1 storyB col2
storyC col1 storyC col2
storyC col1 storyC col2
storyC col1 storyC col2
it would just append A to B to C as it read down the column. I’ve encountered this before.
Here’s some more evidence that the paragraphs were incorrectly parsed:
http://www.uno.edu/~dneubaue/studentpapers/edwards/trial.html
From the cite above (entitled “The New Orleans Mafia trial, 1891”):
"David C. Hennessy, the police superintendent of New Orleans in 1891 was allegedly assisinated by mafia members on October 15, 1891.
The New Orleans “mafia” trial of 1891 provoked the worst mass lynching in US history and made the word “mafia” a common term, There are two accounts of what actually happened in this trial. The first account was of nineteen Italian immigrants that were indicted for the murder of police chief David C. Hemmessey. Lionel Adams was the defense attorney in the murder trial. Adams was able to get all 19 indictments thrown out. The State’s case started to fall apart due to circumstantial evidence such as inconsistent stories from witnesses which ultimately led to 3 of the defendants getting mistrials, 6 were found not guilty, and the other 6 defendants’ charges were dismissed. Following the verdicts of the trial, an estimated 6,000 people stormed the prison and brutally massacred 11 out of the 19 defendants. The second account of the trial suggests that the jury was bribed and even threatened. This is thought to be the reasoning behind the verdicts that shocked the city of New Orleans. When asked, the jurors denied being bribed. They said their decisions resulted from impatience in the jury room, the absence of key witnesses, and other holes in the states’ case. To this day, Hennessey’s murderers have never benn apprehended, and there is an ennormous possibility that 11 innocent immigrants were brutally murdered for something that they had no involvment in. "
No wonder that page was hard to read. Subsequent searches have come up with nothing, and unless DDG happens in with her mad google skillz, it looks to me like someone confused the New Orleans event with the supposed Ohio one, perchance by reading that bungled cite of the 1911 Encyclopedia.