ABSTRACT
In Ernest J. Gaines’s Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, he describes the relationship of Louisiana's rural Italians and African Americans during the 1960s. Miss Jane leads plantation workers to protest segregation in Bayonne, a small town near Baton Rouge, whose courthouse until only a year before had neither a drinking fountain nor an inside bathroom for "colored." Initially, Sicilian immigrants and African Americans in rural Louisiana shared the same low socioeconomic status as wage laborers in rural industries. Regarded by the native white society as racially different and socially inferior, Sicilians interacted freely with their black coworkers while retaining their separate ethnic identity apart from both white Americans and African Americans. From 1890 to 1907, most ship arrivals in New Orleans from Italy occurred between September and December, to coincide with cane harvesting.
