New Haven Register (New Haven, CT)
Columbus statue in Baltimore toppled, thrown into harbor
Protesters pulled a Christopher Columbus statue off its pedestal in Baltimore’s Little Italy neighborhood and threw it into the nearby Inner Harbor on Saturday night, according to videos posted on social media.
Armed with ropes and a crowd numbering more than a hundred, protesters yanked down the Carrara marble statue, then rolled the broken chunks of stone down an embankment and into the water, footage shows. The pieces sent cascades of water skyward before sinking beneath the surface.
The group Baltimore Bloc, which had advocated for the statue to come down, tweeted footage of the crowd heaving a chunk of the statue into the harbor, adding: “Columbus just got deported.”
The statue, erected 36 years ago in a ceremony that included President Ronald Reagan, stood more than 14 feet high on a six-sided marble base with an inscription that read, “CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS DISCOVERER OF AMERICA OCTOBER 12 1492.”
For years, city leaders and activists had clashed with Italian American heritage groups in Baltimore over whether to leave the Columbus statue standing in the heart of a neighborhood built by immigrants. Critics wanted it removed because of what they see as Columbus’s association with the genocide of Native Americans.
As social justice protests have spread across the country in recent weeks, after the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody, activists have targeted statues of Columbus and Confederate figures as key monuments to dismantle.
Demonstrators say the statues celebrate the country’s racist history. Last month, Columbus statutes in St. Paul, Minn.; Boston; Richmond, Va.; and elsewhere were toppled, beheaded or vandalized.
“Statues that celebrate European colonialism necessarily celebrate black slavery, indigenous genocide, human trafficking and rape,” Spencer Compton, a white protester from Baltimore who filmed the toppling of Columbus, said Sunday. “These statues traumatize citizens whose ancestors were enslaved in some form or another.”
Compton, 32, said a crowd gathered about 7 p.m. in the Mount Vernon neighborhood and marched the roughly 1 1/2 miles to the Columbus statue, which sat in a waterfront park at the edge of Little Italy. (House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., grew up in the neighborhood, and her father was the city’s first Italian American mayor.)
By 9 p.m., the statue was down, Compton said. Police did not intervene. Lester Davis, a spokesman for Democratic Baltimore Mayor Jack Young, said the city police’s resources are dedicated to protecting lives, not statues.
“In a city that is still struggling with gun violence, and you have whole communities that have been traumatized, statues, and thinking about monuments, is not top of mind,” Davis said. “Preserving life is.”
Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, a Republican, criticized demonstrators Sunday morning for taking matters into their own hands, and said in a statement that “city leaders need to regain control of their own streets and immediately start making them safer.”
“While we welcome peaceful protests and constructive dialogue on whether and how to put certain monuments in context or move them to museums through a legal process, lawlessness, vandalism, and destruction of public property is completely unacceptable,” Hogan wrote on Facebook. “That is the antithesis of democracy and should be condemned by everyone, regardless of their politics.”
Davis said city officials have “heard that kind of rhetoric from the governor before. And we, quite frankly, don’t have time for it.”
Baltimore, a majority-black city, has hosted weeks of peaceful protests since Floyd’s killing. The city has also been mired in an unprecented wave of homicides over the past five years.
Activists warned Young in June that protesters might destroy the city’s Columbus monuments if they were not promptly removed. City Council member Ryan Dorsey, a Democrat, introduced legislation that month to rename a different monument to Columbus the “Police Violence
Victims Monument.”
The Associated Italian American Charities of Maryland had hired two security guards to watch over the Columbus statue that was toppled Saturday night, board member and former state senator John Pica said. They asked the city to help pay to move the statue, he said, but on Friday, the city declined to do so. His account could not immediately be confirmed with city officials.
“I think this was the city’s way of moving the statute and relocating it,” Pica said. “And right now it’s relocated into the harbor.”
Pica said he and about 10 others unsuccessfully attempted to retrieve the pieces of the statue Sunday morning. The ropes attached by protesters were still looped around the pieces, their loose ends floating on the surface.
Pica said a group of Italian Americans raised money for the statue and flew in marble from their home country to make it. He said he disagrees with demonstrators linking Columbus and his 15th-century explorations to segregationists or with leaders of the Confederacy who fought to maintain white supremacy.