Italian American Role
in History of U.S. Civil Rights,
Topic of New Report from Sons of Italy

Washington, DC-- March 2, 2006 The role men and women of Italian heritage have played in protecting the civil rights of American Indians, African Americans, workers, women and the poor is the subject of a new report from the Order Sons of Italy in America (OSIA), the oldest and largest organization in the United States for men and women of Italian descent.

Believed to be the first such study of its kind, With Liberty For All: Italian Americans & Civil Rights, was researched and released by OSIA’s anti-defamation arm, the Sons of Italy Commission for Social Justice (CSJ).

• Many American Indian languages are known today, thanks to the Italian missionaries who wrote them down in bi-lingual dictionaries, vocabularies and grammar books.



• The first American Indian physician, Carlos Montezuma, was raised by Carlo Gentile, a 19th century Neapolitan photographer of the American West, who rescued him as a child from a band of Pima Indians and later sent him to medical school in Chicago.



• U.S. Congressman Peter Rodino of New Jersey wrote the legislation that helped make Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday a federal holiday in 1983.



• Father Geno Baroni, a civil rights activist priest, marched with Martin Luther King, Jr. and promoted better race relations in 300 inner city neighborhoods in the 1960s and 1970s.



• One of the founders of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union in 1936 was Angela Bambace, a seamstress who later became the union’s first woman officer in 1956.



• Union official Anthony Mazzocchi played a crucial role in establishing the U.S. Labor Department’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which enforces regulations to prevent injury, illness and death in the workplace.



• Before becoming a U.S. Congresswoman and vice presidential candidate, Geraldine Ferraro was a New York district attorney in the 1970s, who started the Special Victims Bureau, which prosecutes sex crimes, child abuse, domestic violence and violent crimes against senior citizens.

"It is most regrettable that the impressive record of Italian Americans as civil rights activists has been overshadowed by the likes of fictional Italian American gangsters like Tony Soprano," says CSJ National President Albert De Napoli, Esq.

Click Here to read With Liberty For All: Italian Americans & Civil Rights.

For a free printed copy, send stamped ($1.95), self- addressed envelope to OSIA Civil Rights Report, 219 E Street NE, Washington, DC 20002.

OSIA is the largest and oldest national organization in the U.S. for men and women of Italian heritage in the United States. It has more than 600,000 members and supporters and a network of more than 700 chapters coast to coast. OSIA works at the community, national and international levels to promote the heritage and culture of an estimated 26 million Italian Americans, the nation’s fifth largest ethnic group, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. See www.osia.org.