South Philadelphia will fight for Columbus statue
Columbus statues have been pulled down all over the country. He’s the trending symbol of hatred, of oppression, of racism and bigotry, so the good and tolerant folk who hate the things they think he did (according to Howard Zinn and other hostile biographers) have been exorcising his spirit by vandalizing his image.
In most cities, they’ve been successful. Next door to us in Camden, his statue was carted away, but not before some residents took possession of a random hand, a sliced off nose, a severed set of toes. Chester has covered over its statue, Boston’s was decapitated and the one in Richmond was thrown into the river and is presumably swimming with the fishes. Minneapolis, site of the George Floyd killing, toppled its own tribute to the Italian wayfarer, and New London Connecticut put him in storage.
But in Philadelphia, Columbus will not go gentle into that good night. As I write these words, a mere three blocks from Marconi Plaza where the gift to the people of Philadelphia from the Italian government has been sitting proudly for almost three decades, there have been days of peaceful, albeit angry protest as those same “people of Philadelphia” fight to honor the powerful weight of history.
Mayor Jim Kenney has already made clear his desire to remove the statue from his old neighborhood, mere blocks from where he grew up. This son of South Philadelphia, who has demonstrated over and over how little care and concern he still harbors for those old neighbors, has made clear his desire to remove the statue. After weekend protests which spilled over into Monday and then Tuesday (the day that I am writing this column), the ItalianAmerican community decided to pre-empt any actions like the one that resulted in Kenney ripping the Rizzo statue off of its pedestal in the wee hours of the morning, and hired an attorney to prevent the statue’s removal.
Kenney was likely outraged that these good people sought protection in the law, thereby limiting his options to “Rizzofy” the statue, and in a pique of executive annoyance, issued a directive to the Philadelphia Arts Commission to “initiate the public process … for the possible removal of the statue.” And, in a message as clear as the Schuylkill is not, Kenney took a rhetorical knee and pretty much regurgitated the narrative that Columbus was a murderer, a demon, a slave holder and the scourge of the indigenous (who were doing those same things to members of other tribes, but Kenney apparently didn’t have room for that paragraph in his letter).
And then, he hauled out the construction workers who may or may not have been union folk, and placed a wooden cage around Columbus to “protect him” while the public hearings proceeded. It was only halffinished when I was there earlier in the day to honor a beloved police captain who’d been reassigned under suspicious circumstances. But when I asked a police officer standing vigil if the statue would still be visible, he told me that he was certain they were going to cover the whole thing in a vertical coffin. And in fact, they did.
In other words, the mayor sought to protect our eyes from having to look at the statue.
In other words, the mayor willingly bent the knee and bowed to bullies.
In other words, the mayor allowed terrorists who traffic in threats and blackmail to impose their vision of tolerance on the rest of us, who believe in the rule of law.
In other words, the mayor told the Italian Americans who helped build the city he now runs that their feelings, their history, their efforts, their accomplishments, their joys, their sorrows, their traditions, their money, their voices, their hopes, and their ownership in Philadelphia are cheap and illegitimate, and that the Faberge Egg sensitivities of resentful children who know as much about Christopher Columbus as they do about Columbus, Ohio, must be honored,
If I sound angry, I am. Anger is not even a word sufficient to describe my feelings, a small verbal vessel for a mighty emotional storm. And I am not alone. There are many of us, from different walks of life and educational backgrounds, political parties and religions, ages and ethnicities who feel the blood race to our temples when we think of Jim Kenney’s attempt to Etch-A-Sketch history. It is a personal thing for Italian Americans, a very personal thing for South Philadelphians, but there is a universality in our shared historical birthright. We all have the right to access history, and memorialize it in stone and paint and music and language. And when one group whines loudly enough about their grievance, their “pain,” the answer is not to placate them by removing the source of that subjective pain.
It is, rather, to allow them to erect their own memorials with their own stories. We do not erase one culture to mollify the narrow-minded hysterics of another.
I can promise Mayor Kenney and his supporters that this does not end here. The statue of Columbus may be in a box at Marconi Plaza, but unlike the dismembered statues in Camden and Boston, the waterlogged one in Richmond, the disappeared one in Connecticut and the toppled one in Minnesota, this one is not going anywhere without a fight.
Philadelphians have a history, after all, of rising up against tyrants.