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EDITOR'S NOTE: This is part of a weekly series on our region's history coordinated by the Trumbull County Historical Society.
One doesn't usually associate Italian immigrants with the brutal subject of lynching. Perhaps that's because this community has surpassed almost all of the bias that met its forebearers upon arrival here.
Certainly, the padrone system of contract labor and the partial ban on immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe are but bitter memories. So are the days of the anti-Catholic KKK in the 1920s. But lynching of Italians did occur in the United States. Even here, in Trumbull County, there was immigrant blood on the ground.
For our purposes, the definition of the NAACP is instructive: ". . . lynching (is) a crime during which the victim is killed illegally by three or more persons claiming to serve the cause of justice or tradition." Summary execution by a mob is another version. Out of a total figure of nearly 5,000 executions by lynching between 1882 and 1968, the victims included 3,500 blacks and 1,300 whites. In the minority were cases involving Mexicans, Chinese and Italians.
Lynching and the threat of lynching developed in the post-Civil War South as terroristic tool to control blacks. But northern states saw the lynching of African Americans, too. Moreover, an Italian-born immigrant, Giovanni Chiesa, aka John Church, was murdered by a mob in one of Trumbull County's coal camps. It happened soon after the mostly Welsh miners' union lost a bitterly contested strike.
The Italian replacements at Church Hill's rich coal pits had figured largely in the operators' victory over the union. Previously, coal operators had threatened to impose a 20-cent pay cut on the diggers. This was met with a defiant mass walk out on Jan. 1, 1873. At its peak, the labor action swelled to 7,500 miners in five counties. Chiesa was one of 200 fellow countrymen transported from New York's immigration station to mines in Church Hill, Liberty Township, for the purpose of starving the strikers into submission. But no one had told the Italians that the job description included strikebreaking.
Early on, violence visited the struck pits. In March, an initial contingent of Italian laborers had been used to keep mines open in Coalburg, Hubbard Township. Strikers there set fire to coal company properties and threatened the Italians. Mine owners evicted striking miners and their families during one of the worst blizzards of that winter.
As the strike weakened, some miners returned to work. On July 27, things came to a head during a confrontation in front of a boarding house at the edge of Church Hill's rich coal field. William Trotter, a Scottish miner, and Chiesa got into a fight. Soon a mob of Trotter's supporters showed up with weapons. The rioters set fire to the dwelling, smoking out the Italian and his compatriots. The terrified occupants fled into the open arms of their waiting attackers.
A German, the only non-Italian who boarded at the house, warned that the violence was spilling out of control and that the constables should be called in to quell the mob. The crowd roared back in unison, "We will be the constables!" Chiesa was beaten to death. His badly injured comrades fled Church Hill, finding refuge in nearby Seceders Cemetery. One of them soon would lose his leg.
While historians record at least 27 summary executions of Italian immigrants, Chiesa's death awaits inclusion in this grim tally, most likely as the first Italian lynched on U.S. soil. The eyewitness accounts recorded in newspapers near and far give ample evidence of the rioters and their actions. A police record of his murder survives. Yes, it happened here in Trumbull County, and coal was at the heart of it.