September 29, 2025

Episode 173 The Forgotten Eleven of New Orleans

27 minutes

In 1891, fear and anger in New Orleans boiled over after the murder of Police Chief David Hennessy. Within months, eleven Italian immigrants were dead, their lives taken by a mob in one of the darkest and most violent moments in American history. In this episode of Southern Mysteries, we revisit the events that led to the tragedy

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Episode Sources

New Orleans Public Library – Records of the Board of Police Commissioners, 1890–1891 (detailing Hennessy’s murder, police leadership changes, and subsequent arrests).

Library of Congress – Historic photographs of New Orleans docks and immigrant labor, 1891.

Smithsonian Magazine – “New Orleans Apologizes for 1891 Lynching of Italian Americans” (April 2019).

History.com – “The Grisly Story of America’s Largest Lynching” (2019).

American Italian Cultural Center, New Orleans – Archival material on Italian immigration and the 2019 mayoral apology.

New Orleans Times-Democrat, October 1890–March 1891 coverage (contemporary reporting on Hennessy’s murder, the trial, and the mob attack).

United States Department of State – Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, 1891 (diplomatic correspondence with Italy following the lynchings).

Reimagining Migration – “The Lynching of Italian Immigrants” (educational resource on anti-immigrant violence).

Order Sons & Daughters of Italy in America (OSDIA) – The 1891 New Orleans Project (materials on commemoration and memorial efforts).

John V. Baiamonte Jr. – “The Mafia and the 1891 New Orleans Lynching: The Question of Criminal Conspiracy” (Louisiana History: The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association, Vol. 21, No. 3, 1980).

Italian Sons and Daughters of America – “Our Darkest Hour: Anarchy, a Lynch Mob and 11 Souls Lost.”

All That’s Interesting – “The Tragic Story of the 1891 New Orleans’ Lynchings of Italians.”

Episode Music

Out of the Mines, courtesy of Ross Gentry, Asheville, North Carolina.

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By Shannon Ballard

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