Dixie’s Italians is the first book-­length study of Sicilians and other Italians in the Jim Crow Gulf South. Through case studies involving lynchings, disenfranchisement efforts, attempts to segregate Sicilian schoolchildren, and turn­-of-the­-century miscegenation disputes, Jackson explores the racial mobility that Italians and Sicilians experienced. Depending on the location and circumstance, Italians in the Gulf South were sometimes viewed as white and sometimes not, occasionally offered access to informal citizenship and in other moments denied it.

This groundbreaking study shows how Sicilians and other Italians helped to both disrupt and consolidate the region’s racially binary discourse and profoundly alter the legal and ideological landscape of the Gulf South at the turn of the century.