Sacco and Vanzetti

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Son Mi Yi English 102 Professor Broderick Sacco and Vanzetti: Medeiros and the Morelli Gang Theory Nicola Sacco, a skilled shoemaker with a growing family,and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, a lonely fish peddler, were arrested for their assumed involvement in an unsuccessful heist in Bridgewater, and the robbery and murder of Fredrick A. Parmenter and Alexander Berardelli in South Braintree, Massachusetts. After trying to prove their innocence for seven long yearsSacco and Vanzetti were executed on August 23, 1927, more because they were immigrant Italian anarchist activists than for the murders and robbery of Slater and Morrill Shoe Company payroll money. They were executed despite growing suspicions by the New BedfordPolice and others had about the Morelli gang’s involvement in the South Braintree and Bridgewater affairs. Unfortunately the theory New Bedford Police had was never fully scrutinized and was disregarded by Chief of Police Michael E Stewart, and later by Judge Webster Thayer, because of their political prejudice towards immigrants and anarchists. According to the speech Italian Anarchist Professed Innocence Until Death by Susan Tejada, by the time Sacco and Vanzetti joined the 750,000 Southern and Eastern European immigrants who came to the United States in 1908, there was already a strong criticism and reaction to theirpresence in America. Between 1880 and 1920 the majority of articles published in magazines were very critical of Italian immigrants. Also between 1890 and 1915, forty-seven Italians were lynched, and the largest mass lynching in American history took place in New Orleans when eleven jailed Italians were killed in a single night in 1891. Nunzio Pernicone states, in About the Sacco-Vanzetti Case, they became radicalized Only after experiencing and observing the hardships and inequities of working-class life in American did they

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