The Forgotten Lynchings of Sicilians in Tampa

By Florida Files Staff

Tampa in the early nineteen hundreds was an industrial crossroads filled with cigar smoke, immigrant ambition, and a deep tension that lay just below the surface. Ybor City and West Tampa had become enclaves filled with Spanish, Cuban, and Sicilian laborers who arrived seeking the promise of steady work and a life far removed from the poverty and political chaos of Southern Italy. But Tampa’s Anglo establishment did not welcome them as equals. Old fears, newspaper stereotypes, and resentment over labor unrest created an atmosphere where the newcomers were watched, judged, and often blamed for crimes they had nothing to do with.

All of that simmering tension exploded in the autumn of nineteen ten, when a local man named John L. Esterling was murdered.

John Esterling was a respected white teamster who lived on the outskirts of Tampa. On the night of September twenty ninth he was ambushed and killed during an attempted robbery. His death was shocking enough on its own, but the response that followed revealed how fragile Tampa’s social fabric truly was. Instead of a careful investigation based on facts, the city gave in to rumor, fear, and vengeance.

Within hours police had rounded up several Sicilian laborers who barely spoke English.

There was no evidence linking them to the murder, but in the minds of many Tampa residents that hardly mattered. For years local newspapers had spread sensational stories about supposed Italian secret societies and the so called Black Hand. Reporters claimed that shadowy foreign criminals were trying to infiltrate the city. In reality these stories were more fiction than fact, but they had shaped public opinion enough that any crime involving an immigrant became proof of a hidden conspiracy.

As word spread that Sicilians had been arrested, anger ignited across Tampa. Hundreds of men gathered outside the city jail on Florida Avenue. They were convinced that the police should hand the prisoners over so the crowd could deliver justice. Officials feared the mob might break into the building, so they quietly moved the prisoners to the West Tampa jail, hoping that the crowd would calm down. Instead the mob simply followed.

By dawn on September thirtieth the scene outside the West Tampa jail had grown even more hostile. A crowd of several hundred men pressed against the building. Many of them were armed. They demanded the prisoners be released to them. The police offered little resistance. Whether the officers were overwhelmed or simply unwilling to risk their lives for immigrant prisoners has remained a point of debate. What is certain is that the mob forced its way inside and dragged out two young Sicilians, Castellano Ficarotta and Angelo Albano.

Neither man spoke enough English to plead for their lives. They were marched down the street toward the intersection of Howard Avenue and Main Street. There, in the gray light of early morning, the mob threw ropes over a telephone pole. Ficarotta and Albano were hanged without trial, without evidence, and without even the chance to face a judge. Their bodies were left suspended for hours while residents passed by and newspapers reported the lynchings as a form of community justice rather than a double murder.

No one was ever arrested. No inquiry was ever held. And later investigations made clear that the men were innocent.

The lynching of Ficarotta and Albano became one of the darkest moments in Tampa’s history. It exposed the deep prejudice that Sicilian and Southern Italian immigrants faced in Florida and across the United States. Between eighteen ninety and nineteen twenty Italians were lynched more often than any other white ethnic group. These killings rarely appeared in official histories. They were buried, forgotten, or framed as community justice rather than racial violence. But for the families who lost loved ones the memory never faded.

Tampa worked hard to erase the episode. The city never acknowledged its role. There were no public apologies and no memorial markers placed at the site. The cigar industry depended on keeping peace between the immigrant communities and the Anglo power structure, and revisiting the lynchings risked reopening old wounds. Silence became the official response.

Yet the story still lives in the old streets where it unfolded. The former site of the West Tampa jail sits near Howard Avenue and Main Street, a place that appears ordinary now but was once the center of a violent mob’s fury. The newspapers that fanned the flames of fear once operated from downtown buildings whose archives reveal how quickly rumor was accepted as truth. And in Ybor City the descendants of the early Sicilian community remember how their families were treated and how easily their neighbors turned against them.

The Esterling lynchings remind us that Florida’s history of racial and ethnic violence is far broader than many people realize. The victims were legally considered white, yet they were viewed as outsiders who did not belong. Their deaths reveal how power, fear, and prejudice can combine to destroy lives.

More than a century later the story still raises important questions. How do communities decide who belongs and who does not? How does fear shape justice? And what happens when the people entrusted with protecting the vulnerable choose instead to look the other way?

These questions linger in the Florida sun, waiting for someone willing to tell the story honestly.

Sources

Tampa Tribune. “Mob Hangs Two Italians.” September 31, 1910.

Tampa Times. “Esterling Murder and the Italian Arrests.” September 30, 1910.

Cannato, Vincent. American Passage: The History of Ellis Island. Harper Collins, 2009.

Diouf, Sylviane and Campbell, Carl, editors. Slavery’s Exiles and Immigrant Violence in the New South. University Press of Florida, 2002.

Ingalls, Robert. Urban Vigilantes in the New South: Tampa, 1882 through 1936. University Press of Florida, 1996.

Tampa Bay History Journal. “The Forgotten Sicilian Lynchings.” Volume 7, Issue 2.

Meacham, Andrew. “Before Ybor City Found Its Identity, It Found Its Enemies.” Tampa Bay Times, archival feature.