Why Columbus Day Became an Italian American Holiday

Just after 9:30 on the night of March 14, 1891, a crowd estimated at several thousand gathered on Canal Street in New Orleans and marched on the Orleans Parish Prison. Hours earlier, a jury had acquitted or deadlocked on all nine Italian immigrants tried for the murder of police chief David Hennessy. The crowd broke into the prison, and by the time it dispersed, eleven Italian men lay dead. It remains the largest single mass lynching in United States history. Fourteen months later, President Benjamin Harrison used the anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s landfall to try to repair what that night had broken.

Columbus Day became an Italian American holiday because it was born, in large part, as an answer to anti-Italian violence. President Harrison’s 1892 proclamation, issued to mark the four-hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s voyage, came seven months after the New Orleans lynchings had triggered a diplomatic break between Italy and the United States. Italian American communities then spent the next eighty years turning a one-time commemoration into a federal holiday, using Columbus — a Genoese navigator sailing for Spain — as proof that an Italian could stand among the founders of American history.

New Orleans, 1891: The Night the Trial Did Not End It

Police chief David Hennessy was shot in the French Quarter on the evening of October 15, 1890, and died the next morning. According to accounts reported at the time, Hennessy was asked who had attacked him and answered with a slur for Italians. On that single, unverifiable word, New Orleans Mayor Joseph Shakspeare ordered a roundup of the city’s Italian residents; estimates of how many were detained range as high as 250. Nineteen men were eventually indicted.

The trial opened in February 1891. On March 13, the jury acquitted six defendants outright and deadlocked on three others — a verdict the local press treated as a scandal rather than a legal outcome. The next night, the mob gathered, stormed the Parish Prison, and killed eleven men: Antonio Bagnetto, James Caruso, Loreto Comitis, Rocco Geraci, Joseph P. Macheca, Antonio Marchesi, Pietro Monasterio, Emmanuele Polizzi, Frank Romero, Antonio Scaffidi, and Charles Traina. Eight of the eleven held U.S. citizenship. No one was ever prosecuted for the killings.

The consequences reached Rome within days. Italy’s consul in New Orleans, Pasquale Corte, filed a formal protest and left the city under instruction from his government the following May. Italy recalled its ambassador from Washington and briefly severed diplomatic relations — a genuine crisis between the two governments, not a diplomatic formality. New Orleans itself issued no apology for 128 years: Mayor LaToya Cantrell finally acknowledged the city’s responsibility at a ceremony with Italy’s consul general on April 12, 2019.

1892: A Proclamation Written to Calm a Crisis

Diplomatic talks dragged through the following year. On April 12, 1892, the United States government agreed to pay an indemnity to the victims’ families — reported in various accounts as either $25,000 or $28,000 — an ex gratia payment that stopped short of admitting legal fault. Relations with Italy formally resumed, though Italian officials remained unsatisfied that no one had faced trial for the killings.

Three months later, with the four-hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s landfall approaching and a difficult re-election campaign against Grover Cleveland ahead of him, Harrison issued his proclamation. Congress had authorized a one-time national holiday, and on July 21, 1892, Harrison called on Americans to mark Friday, October 21, 1892, with “public demonstration and suitable exercises,” urging that the occasion “impress upon our youth the patriotic duties of American citizenship.” The date itself carries a detail most American accounts skip: Columbus made landfall on October 12, 1492 by the Julian calendar then in use, which converts to October 21 under the Gregorian calendar adopted later. Harrison’s proclamation used the corrected date; the 12th stuck in popular use regardless.

The proclamation did real political work. It let an American president honor an Italian explorer at the exact moment the two countries were still negotiating over eleven Italian corpses, without ever naming New Orleans. Harrison lost the November election to Cleveland anyway, becoming part of the answer to a trivia question about the only president elected to two non-consecutive terms — but the Columbus commemoration he created outlived his presidency by well over a century.

From Community Festival to Federal Law

For more than four decades after 1892, Columbus Day remained what individual states and cities chose to make of it. Colorado proclaimed the first statewide holiday in 1905, following lobbying from Angelo Noce, a Colorado-based Italian immigrant and newspaper publisher. Italian American fraternal organizations, chief among them the Knights of Columbus, pushed for broader recognition through the early twentieth century, framing Columbus as evidence that Italian Catholics belonged in the national story at a moment when Italian immigrants faced open discrimination in hiring, housing, and the press.

Congress responded in 1934, passing a joint resolution that authorized the president to proclaim October 12 as Columbus Day each year — making it, for the first time, a recurring national observance rather than a one-off event. It took another federal law to fix it permanently on the calendar. The Uniform Monday Holiday Act, signed by President Lyndon Johnson on June 28, 1968 and effective January 1, 1971, moved Columbus Day to the second Monday in October alongside Washington’s Birthday, Memorial Day, and Veterans Day, guaranteeing federal employees a three-day weekend. Johnson’s own signing statement noted that thirty-four states had already adopted a Columbus observance by that point; the 1968 act simply made the date — and the holiday itself — uniform and federal.

What Columbus Meant to an Immigrant Called “Dago”

Between 1876 and 1914, roughly 13.9 million Italians emigrated abroad, according to Italy’s national statistics office, ISTAT; close to four million of them arrived in the United States between 1880 and 1920 alone, the great majority from the agrarian south and Sicily. They stepped off the boat into a country where “dago” was a common slur, where Italian neighborhoods were routinely blamed for crime, and where the New Orleans lynching had shown, within living memory, exactly how far that hostility could go.

Columbus offered something specific: an Italian who had, in the national myth taught in every American schoolroom, made the country possible in the first place. Building a monument to Columbus, marching in a Columbus Day parade, or funding a statue through an Italian American society was not nostalgia for Genoa. It was a claim staked directly against the slur, made in the one idiom — American patriotic ritual — that the surrounding society was obligated to respect. Parades, statues, and the push for a federal holiday followed the same logic in city after city: New Haven, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco. The strategy worked, in its own terms, over generations rather than years. Italian Americans did not just celebrate Columbus Day; they built it.

The Argument Over Columbus Day Today

That same monument-building is now the center of an active dispute. Critics of Columbus Day point to his role in opening the Americas to colonization, forced labor, and disease that devastated Indigenous populations, and argue that a federal holiday built around him erases that history. In 2020, protesters in several American cities toppled or removed Columbus statues entirely; Chicago’s city government took its own statues down and shifted its schools to observe Indigenous Peoples’ Day instead.

Indigenous Peoples’ Day itself traces to a 1977 United Nations conference on discrimination against Indigenous populations in the Americas. South Dakota adopted it at the state level in 1990; Berkeley, California followed as the first U.S. city the same year. President Joe Biden became the first sitting president to issue a federal Indigenous Peoples’ Day proclamation, alongside the traditional Columbus Day proclamation, on October 8, 2021. His successor took a different line: President Donald Trump’s Columbus Day proclamations in both 2025 and 2026 reaffirmed October’s second Monday as Columbus Day without mentioning Indigenous Peoples’ Day, describing efforts to replace the holiday as an attempt to “erase our history” and defending Columbus’s legacy in explicitly combative terms.

The practical result today is a patchwork rather than a single national answer. Most states and territories still recognize Columbus Day in some form, while a smaller group — Maine, Vermont, New Mexico, and the District of Columbia among them — has replaced it outright with Indigenous Peoples’ Day, and several more mark both on the same date. More than 130 U.S. cities, including Seattle, Denver, Los Angeles, and Phoenix, observe Indigenous Peoples’ Day locally even where their state still calls the day Columbus Day. Both sides of the argument treat the same date as a chance to say something true about American history; they simply disagree about which truth the calendar should hold.

Seen From Italy: A Quieter October 12

None of this argument plays out the same way at home. Italy marks the Giornata nazionale di Cristoforo Colombo, the National Day of Christopher Columbus, on October 12 each year, established not by an act of parliament but by a directive of the Prime Minister’s Office on February 20, 2004, inviting public institutions to organize commemorative initiatives. It is an observance, not a day off: offices, schools, and shops in Italy operate normally. Italian schoolchildren learn Columbus inside the broader story of the Genoese maritime republic and the Age of Exploration, one figure among several, rather than as the center of a single, contested national holiday.

Genoa treats him as a hometown fact rather than a flashpoint. The city bought the house where Columbus is believed to have spent part of his childhood, near Porta Soprana, in 1887 to preserve the physical evidence of his Genoese origins, and the building — now part of a small museum complex run through the Fondazione Palazzo Ducale alongside the adjoining Chiostro di Sant’Andrea — still draws visitors on a modest entrance ticket. Genoa’s city archives at Palazzo Tursi hold several documents long cited as evidence of Columbus’s birth and origins there. I have walked past that house more times than I can count on trips north from the Marche, and what strikes an Italian is less the man than the ordinariness of the claim: Genoa does not need to defend Columbus, because nobody here is arguing about him.

For the Italian American Reader: Where the Story Becomes Yours

If a great-grandparent came through this wave of emigration, October 12 is also a reasonable day to start asking where, exactly, they came from. Italy’s state archives make the paper trail more accessible than most Americans expect: Antenati, the free portal run by the Ministry of Culture, has digitized civil records — birth, marriage, and death registers — from municipal archives across the country, often back into the 1800s, searchable by comune. A parish of baptism, confirmed through local church records, frequently fills the gap civil records leave in the decades before Italian unification. Between the two, a name and an approximate decade of emigration is often enough to locate the actual village, which is where this kind of research becomes personal rather than genealogical.

It is also precisely this ground — tracing a family forward from a single Marche hill town through emigration, war, and silence — that sits behind The English Cave, the story I am still researching about my own grandfather Mario Vitellozzi and the Allied prisoners his family sheltered near Moregnano during the German occupation of 1943–44. I will have more on that soon.

FAQ: Columbus Day and Italian American History

Why is Columbus Day an Italian American holiday? Columbus Day took its modern shape as a direct response to anti-Italian violence, particularly the 1891 New Orleans lynching of eleven Italian immigrants. Italian American organizations spent the following decades promoting Columbus as a symbol of belonging, which is why the holiday carries that identity today even though Columbus sailed for Spain, not Italy.

How many people died in the 1891 New Orleans lynching? Eleven Italian immigrant men were killed by a mob on March 14, 1891, after a trial for the murder of police chief David Hennessy ended in acquittals and a hung jury. It is recorded as the largest single mass lynching in U.S. history.

When did Columbus Day become a federal holiday? Congress authorized an annual presidential proclamation in 1934, following lobbying by the Knights of Columbus. It became a fixed federal holiday on the second Monday in October under the Uniform Monday Holiday Act, signed in 1968 and effective January 1, 1971.

What is Indigenous Peoples’ Day, and how does it relate to Columbus Day? Indigenous Peoples’ Day honors Native American history and resistance to colonization on the same date as Columbus Day. First proposed at a 1977 UN conference, it has since been adopted by several states, Washington, D.C., and more than 130 U.S. cities, either replacing Columbus Day locally or observed alongside it.

Does Italy celebrate Columbus Day the way the United States does? No. Italy observes the Giornata nazionale di Cristoforo Colombo on October 12, established by a 2004 government directive, but it is a low-key institutional observance rather than a day off, and it carries none of the political controversy attached to the American holiday.

Can I visit the house where Columbus grew up? Genoa preserves a house near Porta Soprana, purchased by the city in 1887, understood to be where Columbus’s family lived during part of his childhood. It is open to visitors on a modest ticket as part of a small historical complex; confirm current hours before you go, since they shift by season.

How do I start researching Italian immigrant ancestors? Begin with what your family already has — a name, a town, an approximate arrival date — then search Italy’s free Antenati portal for digitized civil records from the relevant comune, and follow up with parish baptismal records for anything before Italian civil registration began.

The Takeaway

Columbus Day did not start as a celebration of 1492. It started as a president’s attempt to hold two countries together after a mob killed eleven men, and it became, over the following century, the clearest marker Italian Americans had for claiming a place in a country that had just shown them how unwelcome they could be made to feel. That history explains both why the holiday exists in its current form and why so many Americans now argue about keeping it. None of that argument changes how quietly October 12 passes in Genoa, where nobody needs convincing that an Italian sailor once mattered to the world.

If your own family’s story runs through this same emigration, and you are not sure where in Italy it starts, that is exactly the kind of research The Engineer’s Italy digs into. Join the newsletter for more on sources, record-tracing, and the family history work behind pieces like this one.