The 1891 New Orleans lynchings were the murders of 11 Italian Americans and Italian immigrants in New Orleans by a mob of whites for their alleged role in the murder of police chief David Hennessy after some of them had been acquitted at trial. It was the largest single mass lynching in American history. Most of the lynching victims accused in the murder had been rounded up and charged due to their Italian race.

Francis Redding Tillou Nicholls was an American attorney, politician, judge, and a brigadier general in the Confederate States Army during the American Civil War. He served two terms as the 28th Governor of Louisiana, first from 1876 to 1880 after the Reconstruction era ended and from 1888 to 1892.