Just tear it down, shout protesters
A HANDFUL OF protesters demanded the removal of the Christopher Columbus statue — and the day honoring him — as the annual parade in his name took place Monday along Fifth Ave. in Midtown.
City Councilwoman Inez Barron and her husband, Assemblyman Charles Barron, stood at the base of the 115-year-old statue in Columbus Circle and said the name of the holiday should be changed to Indigenous Peoples Day.
“As we say, Columbus only discovered that he was lost,” said the assemblyman, who plans to introduce a bill renaming the holiday in Albany. “He never discovered anything else. He called everybody Indians because he was looking for India. He was a colonizer. He was a racist. He was a murderer.”
Surrounded by a small group of supporters, Inez Barron said more emphasis should be placed on teaching the history of Native Americans. “We need to tell their story,” she said. “That there were people here, that they were massacred, they were deliberately infected with disease.”
Gov. Cuomo has vowed to keep the Christopher Columbus statue where it is.
"As long as I am governor of the great state of New York, there will be a statue of Christopher Columbus standing tall and proud in the City of New York," the governor told people gathered Saturday at the Columbus Citizens Foundation Gala.
“Government cannot seek to impose its own political ideology on the people. If you disagree with what Christopher Columbus symbolizes, you have the right to do that,” the governor added. “Don’t march in the parade. Go outside and hold a sign, God bless you. But no one, no one has the right to attack or deny our celebration or our pride of our great heritage.”
Mayor de Blasio has assembled a task force to review statues on city property that may symbolize racism or anti-Semitism and recommend which to remove.
The Columbus statue should be at the top of the list, according to Inez Barron, along with a statue of J. Marion Sims, a doctor who performed experiments on enslaved women without anesthetic during the 1800s. The Sims statue, at E. 103rd St. and Fifth Ave., was vandalized in August,