Eleven Italian Americans were lynched in New Orleans on March 14, 1891, by a mob of upwards of twenty thousand people. They had been called together by the city's political, business, and labor elites a day after a jury acquitted six Italian Americans of the murder of the city's police chief. Those responsible for the lynching proudly took credit for it, but no one was charged or punished for it.

The lynching caused a crisis between the President and Congress of the United States, between Washington and Rome. The lynching was used by lobbyists to further the building of an American Navy to achieve American status as a world power, and by nativists to restrict immigration and to repress immigrant populations. It also introduced a sinister word to America: Mafia.