During World War II, the U.S. Saw Italian-Americans as a Threat to Homeland Security

Feb 06, 2017 1815

Frrank DiCara is 90 years old, but he still remembers what it felt like to wake up an enemy in his hometown. It was 1941, and he was a 14-year-old kid in Highlandtown, an Italian-American neighborhood in Baltimore, when news broke that Japan had bombed Pearl Harbor, bringing the U.S. into war with the Axis Powers of Japan, Germany and Italy.

For people like Frank, whose parents had come from Sicily three decades before, the news was doubly horrifying. Along with the anger and amazement that America had been attacked came the unbelievable news that Italy—their homeland—was suddenly the enemy. Overnight, the land his parents remembered fondly from their youth—and where they still had family—couldn’t be talked about without risking treason.




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SOURCE: http://www.smithsonianmag.com

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