Keeping Chris at City Hall
Statue should teach, not be, history
Critics and defenders of Christopher Columbus’ statue at City Hall do have one thing in common: an ignorance of history, or at least a passion to oversimplify it.
On Saturday, demonstrators demanded the statue be removed. Columbus indeed was a brutal conquistador. The stories of his treatment of the peaceful indigenous people are horrific. People were murdered and enslaved, including girls forced into sexual servitude.
Our explorer is a perverse hero. It is difficult to deny Columbus’ direct influence on opening the Americas to European exploration. He wasn’t the first to reach the New World; that’s credited to Viking Leif Eriksson. But news of Columbus’ success set the stage for the European colonization. He radically changed history.
Anyone who ever has been out of sight of land in a small boat on a big ocean — even today, with motors and GPS — must realize the bravery Columbus’ voyage required. Nor were the Aztecs, who practiced human sacrifice, and some other indigenous inhabitants of this hemisphere paragons of mercy.
It is absurd to judge all historical figures’ actions by today’s more enlightened morality. Do we remove statues and paintings of Thomas Jefferson, our third president and author of one of the finest treatises on liberty, the Declaration of Independence? He fathered children by his slave, Sally Hemings, a relationship that began when she was as young as 14. She wasn’t his mistress. She was his property.
Historical figures reflected the times in which they lived. Removing their statues or portraits won’t cleanse the stain of history, but it will sanitize it. Which seems to be what Saturday’s demonstrators wish.
“There are symbols and institutions of white supremacy everywhere,” explained a protest organizer Tynan Krakoff, 29, of Columbus.
It is reasonable to remove Confederate leaders’ statues from the public square. Their treason led to the spilling of blood of more than 600,000 Americans; and these monuments pour acid in the nation’s stillopen wounds of racism. Many were erected not in the emotional aftermath of a crushing war but decades later, to bolster Jim Crow-era racial suppression. Columbus’ sins aren’t related to that.
Columbus Mayor Andrew J. Ginther struck the right tone, saying, “There are many perspectives on the Christopher Columbus statue, but let’s not be distracted from the need to address the real problem: the racial divide in our community and across the country.”
There’s another danger. Who gets to be the arbiter of offense and history?
The Columbus statue was brought here by the persistent work of an immigrant named Sal Spalla, who thought our city should have something bigger than the puny statute that sat Downtown in 1950. Spalla wrote to the mayor of Genoa, Italy, and others to obtain something more impressive. The statue was paid for, in part, with contributions from the schoolchildren in Genoa as a gift to our city.
Spalla came to America at age 5, crossing Christopher’s ocean. At his funeral, in 2002, mourners sang a favorite: “America the Beautiful.”
He meant for the statue to educate and inspire future generations. Though public sentiment may evolve, the statue should continue to educate, but perhaps in a different way than originally intended: with an honest recounting of history, good and bad, in a city that still bears his name.