A Short-Lived Venture in the Shadow of Fascism: Bartolini Teacher in Nashville’s African American Schools
In the February 14, 1937 issue of the Tennessean, Primo Bartolini is portrayed in two rare photographs attesting his prominent role as teacher of Italian in Nashville between the two wars.
Although it’s currently impossible to determine when Bartolini started teaching Italian at Fisk University - the oldest institution of higher learning in Nashville – and at Tennessee Agricultural and Industrial School (now Tennessee State University), we can positively acknowledge that Primo was the first white faculty to teach at both historically black colleges.
Bartolini is said to have taught two classes of African American students (both males and females), and his activity as a teacher of Italian in Nashville intersected a little-known moment in history that occurred in the aftermath of the Italian annexation of Eritrea and Ethiopia in 1936. Ras Imru (Imiru), son-in-law of Hailé Selassié and formerly head of the defeated Ethiopian army, was quick to affirm his allegiance to the new Emperor Victor Emmanuel III, King of Italy and become an agent for the Italian government. In his new capacity, Imru issued a blanket invitation to people worldwide to be a part of the development of the Horn of Africa.
Primo Bartolini, as many Italian Americans, remained infatuated with Fascism and its distorted educational ideology. He thought that his teaching efforts to foster the knowledge and appreciation of Italian language and culture in Nashville could be useful to Mussolini’s and his newly conquered empire’s cause.
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He thus vowed to form a new educated class of African-Americans from Nashville who could be fruitfully employed as new settlers for the Italian colonies in Africa. We have no further details, at present, as to whether this project of somehow ‘whitening’ the black population of Nashville through the language of the Italian colonialist power continued beyond what appears to be a journalistic boutade.
Bartolini’s honeymoon with Fascism would soon come to an end once the brief illusion of belonging to a glorious empire was shattered by the consolidation of the political axis between the Duce and Nazi Germany.
