From the mid-1920s through the late 1930s, Il Gladiatore and the Columbus–Balbo Review functioned as institutions of Birmingham’s Italian community. They did more than report events and their pages taught readers how to prepare for naturalization, exercise the vote, support civic charities, pursue education and enter the professions. In print, a dispersed immigrant population became a visible civic community.
This process brought together several forms of belonging. Attachment to Italy coexisted with loyalty to the United States; admiration for Fascist Italy accompanied claims to American citizenship and respectability. These claims also developed within the racial order of Jim Crow. The newspapers reveal how Italian Americans constructed their place in Birmingham through citizenship, public service, professional achievement, Fascist affiliation and racial positioning.
Between Italy and America
The Italian community’s American city and its distant homeland were presented as parts of a single political and emotional landscape. Il Gladiatore described initiatives undertaken for both the “distant homeland” and the “adopted country.” The Columbus–Balbo Review, an English-language monthly published by Elviro Di Laura from 1933 to 1938, made its Fascist affiliation visible in its title, joining Christopher Columbus to Italo Balbo. Its pages placed Birmingham’s Italian Americans within the modern prestige of Fascist Italy while simultaneously asserting their loyalty to the United States.
A panoramic view of Birmingham anchors the Review’s readers within their American city. Printed on a page celebrating Italo Balbo’s transatlantic squadron, the image connects Birmingham’s urban and industrial modernity to the international prestige of Fascist Italy.
Reprinted from the Washington Post, “Italy Inspires All” celebrates Balbo’s transatlantic flight as a triumph of Italian courage, technical skill, teamwork and discipline. By reproducing the article, the Review made Balbo’s achievement part of the public identity of Alabama’s Italian community.
The English-language clipping recalls Elviro Di Laura and Antonio Rovegno presenting an Italian flag to Nashville City Hall in 1918, with additional flags displayed at the Tennessee State Capitol, Post Office and Hume-Fogg High School. The adjoining Italian article presents such initiatives as service to the “distant homeland” and the “adopted country” and identifies Primo Bartolini as Nashville’s teacher of Italian at the Conservatory of Music.
These two reprints from the Italo-American appeared side by side. “The Efficient American” praises “Wise Mussolini” and the productive qualities attributed to Italian workers. “Italian-American Patriotism” celebrates an unemployed Italian American woman who sent President Franklin D. Roosevelt a gold coin and her only piece of jewelry during the banking crisis. The page presents admiration for Mussolini and loyalty to the United States as parts of the same Italian American identity.
Subtitled “An Appreciation of the Italian-American Citizens of Birmingham,” the article uses exploration, labor, military service, culture and patriotic sacrifice to claim a complete place for Italians within the nation. Its title transforms American belonging from an aspiration into a public declaration: Italian immigrants and their descendants were “All Americans Now.”
Learning and Performing Citizenship
Citizenship was presented as a body of knowledge and a set of everyday practices. Readers learned the structure of American government, prepared for naturalization, registered to vote and supported Birmingham’s civic institutions. The newspapers acted as informal classrooms, translating national belonging into actions that could be learned and publicly performed.
This bilingual series explained the Constitution, Congress, the presidency and Alabama government to readers seeking American citizenship. Its question-and-answer structure transformed preparation for naturalization into a printed catechetical dialogue. The form echoes the political catechisms of the Risorgimento and their Mazzinian conception of citizenship as something created through the education of the people. In Birmingham, that nineteenth-century pedagogical language was redirected toward American naturalization, teaching both civic knowledge and the English in which it had to be demonstrated.
The newspaper urged Italian American citizens between the ages of twenty-one and forty-five to pay the $1.50 poll tax, register and preserve their right to vote. Political participation was presented as a community obligation. At the same time, Italians were entering an electoral system in which the poll tax formed part of the Jim Crow machinery used to exclude Black and poor voters.
In a WBRC radio speech reproduced by Il Gladiatore, J. J. Fiore called on Birmingham’s Italian-descent residents to support the Community Chest and the thirty-three welfare agencies it funded. Charitable giving became a public expression of American citizenship and of the Italian community’s responsibility to the wider city.
Entering Public Life: Nina Miglionico
Professional achievement offered another route into American public life. The Review’s presentation of Nina Miglionico (1913–2009) gave that process an individual and distinctly female form. Born in Birmingham to Italian immigrant parents, Miglionico graduated from the University of Alabama’s law school in 1936 and established her own practice when opportunities for women lawyers were scarce. In celebrating her achievement in 1937, the newspaper presented education as a means for the children of Italian immigrants, including daughters, to enter the professions and gain civic authority.
Her subsequent career carried that promise into local and national politics. A campaigner for women’s rights and racial equality, she became Birmingham’s first woman city council member in 1963. She also contributed to President John F. Kennedy’s Commission on the Status of Women, serving on its Committee on Social Insurance and Taxes, whose records survive among her papers at the University of Alabama.
The Review introduced University of Alabama law graduate Nina Miglionico and announced her practice in Birmingham’s Massey Building. It presented her as the first Italian woman practicing law in the Southern states and urged the community to support her professionally. Italian parents were encouraged to help their children rise into the “higher spheres of public life.”
The Review reported that nineteen Italians were among forty-six people naturalized in federal court on 29 September 1938. The roster includes Rosario Schilleci. The article presents citizenship as loyalty to the Constitution and laws of the United States without requiring immigrants to abandon their attachment to the country of their birth.
Citizenship and the Color Line
Italian claims to citizenship and civic respectability developed inside the racial order of the Jim Crow South. The newspapers could condemn violence against Black residents and the spectacle of a public execution while continuing to accept segregation and describe Italian advancement as the progress of the Italian “race.” These apparent contradictions reveal the racial boundaries within which Italian Americans sought acceptance.
The article condemns a belt-and-paddle assault on a Black married couple and defends their right to walk through Birmingham without harassment. Yet it also asserts white superiority and accepts limits on interracial association. Opposition to individual violence therefore coexisted with support for the racial hierarchy of the Jim Crow South.
Italian Race Making Its Mark, published on the Editor’s Page of the Columbus–Balbo Review in October 1936 (p. 1), presents achievement in business, education, culture and politics as evidence of the collective worth of the Italian “race.” It praises the diligence of Italian students, the contributions of successful men and women and the patriotism of Italian Americans, connecting these qualities to the prestige of Columbus. Italian ancestry becomes a source of civic virtue, while individual accomplishments support a claim to recognition for the whole community. For readers in the Jim Crow South, this language offered a way of asserting respectable American belonging: Italians appeared as contributors to the nation’s prosperity and guardians of its ideals of liberty.
Directly beneath this article, in the same right-hand column, the separate editorial Is This America? exposes a disturbing failure of those ideals. Describing the public hanging of a twenty-two-year-old Black man in Owensboro, Kentucky, it condemns the festive crowds, food vendors and spectators scrambling for pieces of the rope and hood as souvenirs. Its concern is the transformation of a human death into entertainment and the failure of American education to teach common decency. Read together, the articles place the celebration of Italian civic virtue alongside a challenge to America’s claims to civilization. Yet the editorial itself invokes the Congo and the “Orient” as places where such brutality might supposedly be expected. Its outrage therefore retains a racial and colonial hierarchy: the newspaper could condemn cruelty toward a Black man while reproducing assumptions about civilized and supposedly uncivilized peoples. Opposition to racial brutality and acceptance of racial hierarchy could occupy the same printed page.
