This wasn’t true, and there are actually dark-skinned Italians all over Italy, not just in the South, as well as light-skinned Italians all over Italy. The very few Northern Italians that immigrated here perpetuated the myth that Southern Italians and Greeks were of a different race than them in order to save their own asses. One of the biggest mass lynchings happened to Italians in New Orleans when they thought that a Italian immigrant had killed a “white” police officer. They were designated as “black” on census forms if they lived in the South and that is because the majority of them were dark-skinned Sicilians. They weren’t allowed to marry “whites.” It was difficult, damn near impossible. Southern Italians were considered “black” in the South and were subjected to the Jim Crow laws of segregation.
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