Pause urged on changing Columbus Day name
When Cook County Commissioner Stanley Moore was a child, he used to hold up aged photographs of his great-great-grandparents dressed proudly in dapper black suits, with the mother’s hands folded over each other like a dove and the father’s lips turned slightly down, as if in defiance.
Moore said he was told that the two were part of the Choctaw Nation. But it wasn’t until he entered college in the late ‘80s that he began researching his ancestry and learned that his great-great-grandmother was fathered by a Choctaw man and his slave, he said. She would go on to marry a man whose parents also were enslaved by a Native American tribe, according to oral history, he said.
That was how the story of Cannie Brown and William Alford Trotter began, Moore said.
“It was an eye-opening experience,” Moore said in a phone interview. “To find out that we were actually enslaved to Indians — it’s an awakening.”
Soon after the Civil War, the federal government ordered the Five Civilized Tribes — the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee (Creek) and Seminole nations — to recognize Freedmen, Black people once enslaved by tribal citizens, with citizenship and rights. Though only the Cherokee Nation currently does, on Friday, leaders of the Choctaw and Muscogee nations announced they began considering a process to change their constitutions to grant citizenship to Freedmen descendants.
For Indigenous people, a fight to be recognized
Les Begay, a Rogers Park resident and a citizen of the Dine’ Nation, also known as the Navajo Nation, said he felt “elated” when he woke up one July morning and saw the Christopher Columbus statues in Grant and Arrigo parks were hauled away overnight. The lingering empty pedestals capped off the prior week’s mass protest at Grant Park that led to people throwing fireworks, scaling the statue and attempting to topple it before Chicago police cracked down, though
Mayor Lori Lightfoot had said the removal was only temporary.
But Begay said he worries the appetite to reexamine historical figures following the death of George Floyd, a Black man who was murdered by a Minneapolis police officer a year ago, will soon be forgotten, just like he feels Native Americans are. Sometimes, people express surprise when he gives talks on Indigenous issues because they are unaware such a population still exists in America, he said.
Italian Americans cite own history of oppression
Another group that has passionately weighed in on the issue of Columbus Day says they, too, are marginalized. Salvatore Camarda, a Chicago resident who is part of the Joint Civic Committee of Italian Americans, testified during Monday’s committee meeting and recounted a history of violence against Italian Americans since their first immigrant communities cropped up during the colonial periods.
“Although we were beaten, lynched, murdered and told ‘no Italians need apply,’ our culture and our mark on this land is significant and important,” Camarda said. “Columbus Day is our celebration of these tragedies and triumphs.”
Many supporters of Indigenous Peoples Day do not deny Italian Americans were indeed ostracized. According to the Library of Congress, as more Italian immigrants entered America starting in the late 1800s, they were among some of the lowest-paid workers in the country and often lived in slums. In 1891, a mob of thousands shot and mutilated 11 Sicilian Americans in one of the largest lynchings in U.S. history.
Columbus, born in what is now Italy before he landed in the present-day Caribbean in 1492 while attempting to find Asia, has become a romanticized figure among some Italian American circles who later began hailing the explorer as the embodiment of their own hardscrabble voyages to America in search of a better life. That led to Columbus Day becoming a federal holiday in 1971 that falls on the second Monday of October as well as pressure from Native Americans and their supporters to replace it with Indigenous Peoples Day, citing evidence that Columbus brought brutality, disease and slavery to those populations.
An uncertain future for Columbus Day in Cook County
It was under those three currents — the Freedmen controversy, the historic plights of the Native American population and the backlash from some Italian American leaders — that the proposed county resolution was debated in Monday’s committee meeting. No vote happened, but the committee chair Commissioner Larry Suffredin said he intends to hold a vote in late June regardless of whether compromises can be made. He has not revealed how he will vote.
Across the nation, the debate over either abolishing or replacing Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples Day has been playing out in state legislatures and city halls. In Illinois, lawmakers in 2017 designated a statewide Indigenous Peoples Day as the last Monday in September, which advocates say does not go far enough. Chicago Public Schools as well as a handful of suburbs, including Evanston, observe Indigenous Peoples Day over Columbus Day.
The pending county resolution’s co-sponsor, Commissioner Brandon Johnson, said he sympathizes with Moore’s back story. But he doesn’t believe the county should wait until the tribal nations act, though he added as of this week, he doesn’t have all the votes yet.
“We have to make sure that we are implementing and pushing policy that we have the authority to actually enact,” Johnson said in a phone interview.
Despite their differences, Moore and Johnson will embark on a trip this weekend to Tulsa, Oklahoma, for the centennial anniversary of the massacre on Black Wall Street. During that excursion, Moore said he plans to talk to fellow Freedmen and piece together more of his past.