Word: italian-american
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...organ on the bandstand piped out random tunes for the early arrivals. Vendors set up rows of gaily colored booths to sell buttons (WE'RE NO. l), pennants (ITALIAN POWER!) and other paraphernalia of prideful protest. Now, in the already shimmering morning heat, the buses came rolling in from Corona in Queens, Bensonhurst in Brooklyn, Greenwich Village and all the Little Italys of the city. The occasion was the Italian-American Civil Rights League's second annual Unity Day, and it was meant to be fun for everyone...
...hospital's entrances, small groups of outsize, burly men, wearing tiny green-and-red Italian-American League pins, nervously watched the streets, quickly sizing up each approaching pedestrian. "You watch this stairway," one bull-necked "captain" instructed a younger man. "If somebody goes into the hallway, you follow him. If he gets in the elevator, you get in with him. And if he gets off at the floor, you tell him he can't go no further...
...acted at once. He took the usual steps of putting up bail and hiring a top lawyer to look for irregularities and loopholes. Then he did something new. He began picketing the FBI, claiming that he and his family were being harassed. After several months of daily demonstrations, the Italian-American Civil Rights League was formed...
...league's first major action was to sponsor Italian-American Unity Day last year. The rally conspicuously closed stores in neighborhoods controlled by the Mafia; New York's waterfront was virtually shut down when many longshoremen took the day off for the ethnic celebration, and almost every politician in the city joined the 50,000 celebrants in Columbus Circle. Nelson Rockefeller was offered honorary league membership and accepted...
...Italian stereotypes in their advertising led to cancellation of television commercials, including a prizewinning Alka-Seltzer ad, "Spicy Meatballs." The Ford Motor Co. assured the league that in television series it sponsored the FBI would not track down criminals belonging to something called the Mafia. Plans for a $3.5 million hospital were announced; recently the league set up a children's summer camp. A year after the first pickets marched in front of FBI headquarters, Colombo was honored as league man-of-the-year. Thirteen hundred people came to the dinner marking his "undying devotion to the Italian-American people...