ABSTRACT
In August 1895, African American newspapers across the United States focused their readers' attention on Spring Valley, Illinois, a small coal-mining town one hundred miles southwest of Chicago. On August 5, a mob of Spring Valley's new immigrants Italians, Poles, Germans, French, Lithuanians, and members of other ethnic groups attacked the African American community. At a moment when Reconstruction era rights were recoiling and Jim Crow segregation became entrenched, blacks were particularly concerned with the "race conflict" at Spring Valley. Collapsing the nationality of the rioters, an incensed reporter for the Richmond Planet wrote, "The Southern bourbon Negro-hater is not present in Illinois, but the Italian has arisen in his stead." Chicago's Italian-language newspaper, L'Italia, depicted the community by combining national identification (Italianness) with a pan-European whiteness.
