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The lynching of “Dago Joe” on June 11, 1887, in Shelby, Mississippi, both highlights and obscures this developing association. Throughout the late spring of 1887, local papers reported on the latest news concerning “the dago who killed young Mr. Walter Haynes.”51 “Dago Joe,” the press proclaimed, was aiming at a station agent who had expelled him from a depot building, when he “accidentally” and “without provocation” shot the “innocent” and “popular” Haynes; a statewide manhunt promptly ensued.52 The Greenville Times reported on various attempts to capture the “dago,” including one instance in which a local citizen shot himself in the foot “endeavoring to creep up” on someone mistakenly believed to be “Dago Joe.”53 By June, the Daily Picayune reported that “Dago Joe,” the “murderer,” had been lynched: “From last reports Dago Joe was still swinging.”54 However, despite his moniker and despite the fact that “Dago Joe” is included within existing tabulations of Sicilian lynchings, he may not have actually been Italian.
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Jessica Barbata Jackson (Dixie’s Italians: Sicilians, Race, and Citizenship in the Jim Crow Gulf South)