Board explores renaming Columbus Day
Christopher Columbus, who died 512 years ago, isn’t resting in peace.
The San Francisco Board of Supervisors is set to decide Tuesday whether to strip the debatable discoverer of his official day in San Francisco and rechristen the second Monday in October as Indigenous Peoples Day.
Although governments from the state of Alaska to the town of Anadarko, Okla., have issued Indigenous Peoples Day proclamations in recent years, it turns out the idea is not without controversy.
“Don’t these people at City Hall have anything else to do?” said Luciano Repetto, the man who grinds the beans at Graffeo Coffee on Columbus Avenue in the heart of North Beach, which retains a healthy population of Italian Americans. “Isn’t there anything more important to vote on?”
In Washington Square, the morning crowd was sticking up for the seafaring man from Genoa.
“I think Columbus is getting a bad rap,” said street musician Phil Jenkins, strumming his six strings. “This is all too much to hang on one guy’s head. Why can’t you have Indigenous Peoples Day without taking something away from somebody else?”
Native Americans have long argued that Columbus Day, a federal holiday since 1934, honors a fellow for “discovering” a land long-since discovered by the people who had been living there for eons.
The Columbus Day Parade began calling itself the Italian Heritage Parade some 24 years ago. San Francisco schoolchildren have referred to their blessed day off from school as Indigenous People’s Day since 1992, although the school board did not officially do away with Columbus Day until last year.
“For people who have studied history, they know that Christopher Columbus as a person is not somebody who we should be celebrating in our schools,” school board member Matt Haney said then. “He is somebody who committed tremendous acts of cruelty and murder.”
Columbus’ defenders say he doesn’t deserve all the blame.
“Rewriting history is a slippery slope,” said Nick Figone, chief operating officer of the Italian Athletic Club. “To pin everything on Columbus is unfair and inaccurate. What are they going to take away next, Mission Dolores? Junipero Serra Boulevard? Are they going to rename Columbus Avenue?
Informed of the upcoming vote, Italian Athletic Club president Guido Perego hustled to City Hall on Monday to see what could be done. He met with one supervisor and two supervisors’ aides and told them that he and all of North Beach favored postponing the vote. But Perego said he left the great stone building with no promises on behalf of Columbus.
“We’ll have to see what happens,” Perego said.
Supervisor Malia Cohen, a sponsor of the bill, said in a hearing last week that dropping the official Columbus Day designation was “incredibly important and quite frankly overdue.” Her bill, she added, was “not a controversial item.”
The proposed law, Cohen pointed out, would not prohibit the city from supporting “references” to Columbus Day. She was not available for comment Monday.