The Ohio town I was born in was primarily Catholic throughout the 20th century. My paternal ancestor who immigrated from Ireland came over at the very end of the 19th century and died a couple decades later at the beginning of the 20th.

I learned a little bit about the segregation you speak of by visiting his grave. The Catholic cemetery is divided into quite obviously segregated sections, one for people of Italian ancestry and the other for people of Irish ancestry.

The Irish section of the cemetery reflects a much more economically depressed group of people. The graves are very close together, and the headstones are simple, small markers lying horizontally on the ground. Many of them have been swallowed up by the Earth over the last century.

By contrast, the Italian section of the cemetery reflects a lot of wealth, with large, intricate granite or marble monuments, and quite a few elaborate ossuaries.

Some of that reflects expected cultural practices, but by the stories my grandmother told me, the Irish community in that town was extremely poor to the middle of the 20th century. Work could be hard to find, and the Irish were the last to be hired.

Of course, that's long in the past, and people today barely even remember the stigma of being Irish.

But that cemetery is still there to remind us!