For Italian Americans, it’s about ‘heritage’
Columbus statue: Reviled by many; a symbol of pride for others
NEW HAVEN — For most of the few dozen Italian Americans who stood in support of the Christopher Columbus statue that overlooked Wooster Square Park for 128 years — until Wednesday — their support isn’t, and never was, about Columbus.
They were there in the name of Italian heritage and out of respect for the neighborhood they or their families grew up in — and the hard-working Italian immigrants who raised money to put the statue there on Oct. 12, 1892.
“I was down there because of my parents and my grandparents,” said John Scafariello of New Haven. Scafariello grew up in The Hill section and now lives on Orange Street but has long been a member of the Santa Maria Maddelena Society, as his parents were before him, which still is headquartered on Wooster Street.
He said he showed up in hopes of stopping the city from taking the statue down “out of of respect to my grandparents and my parents — and to myself and to my family, too.
“It’s a sad day,” Scafariello said. Wooster Street and Wooster Square are still considered “Little Italy,” although they long have been more diverse than just that, and continue to grow that way.
The statue, which a rigging crew hired by the parks department carefully removed from its pedestal Wednesday after a brief, heated clash between supporters of the statue and activists and neighbors who wanted it gone, was installed back in 1892 ostensibly to celebrate the 400th Anniversary of Columbus and his three ships landing in the New World.
Several of the statue’s supporters pointed out, however, that it was installed just a few months after the mass lynching of 11 Sicilian-born Italian Americans in New Orleans — which took place on March 14, 1891.
Columbus Day, itself, began in the wake of the lynchings when President Benjamin Harrison issued a proclamation in 1892, urging Americans to mark the day, initially as a one-time celebration. Both Lou Pane and Marc Conte, who co-organized Wednesday’s protest — and were not among the people involved in the skirmish — said their support of the now-removed statute is not about Columbus.
Conte and Pane also are organizers of the Italian-American Heritage Group of New Haven, which has filed for two injunctions; one to prevent the removal of the statue and one Friday asking where the statue is being stored and seeking assurances that the statue and the base are preserved.
“For me, in 1892, the Italian immigrants when they came to the United States, they donated this to the city of New Haven...” said Pane, pointing out that the statue was erected not long after the New Orleans lynchings.
“What bothered me the most about that was, the hard-working immigrants, the immigrants that came here, they rallied up their gifts ... to give the area this statue,” said Pane, who is East Haven’s recreation director and the longtime East Haven High School hockey coach
“It’s about my heritage,” Pane said. “When the Italians came here, they were given the toughest time. When they stopped slavery in this country, they recruited southern Italians to work in the fields ... they were getting the lowest grade of wages.”
The original copper statue was recast in bronze in 1955.
In the wake of widespread unrest following the death of George Floyd beneath the knee of a Minneapolis police officer, calls to remove statues of Columbus, as well as Confederate war figures, have rolled across the country. A similar issue currently is unfolding in South Philadelphia, where another long-standing statue is expected to come down.
While the story of Columbus and his ships, the Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria arriving in the New World has been taught for decades in schools, the history of Columbus encountering the Awawaks in the Caribbean, as written by Howard Zinn, is a story of genocide and slavery.
Based on reports by a priest — Bartolomé de las Casas — Zinn wrote that the Arawak tribe resorted to suicide because of their treatment. “Infants were killed to save them from the Spaniards. In two years, through murder, mutilation or suicide, half of the 250,000 Indians on Haiti were dead,” Zinn wrote.
Pane said that if you go back in history, “everyone has a clouded past.” He said Eli Whitney’s cotton gin greatly increased the need for slave labor; Ehihu Yale, for whom Yale University is named, owned slaves, as did George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.
After hearing about the possibility of the statue being taken down, Conte and Pane organized the “Italian American Heritage of New Haven” Facebook page, now up to nearly 800 followers, a couple of weeks ago.
Then they got the ball rolling for Wednesday’s protest with a post urging people to come out early Wednesday after they got word that the city was going to remove the statute.
They quickly canceled a rally that had been scheduled for Saturday after the statue was taken down — and especially after a few people on both sides boiled over into a brief flurry of violence Wednesday morning.
No one was arrested, although one supporter of the statue was briefly detained.
“We’re not going to have a rally, that’s for sure, because we’d probably have a blood bath — and I don’t want that on my head,” said Conte.
At one point after Wednesday’s events, “I said to Louie, “somehow, do I think that we caused this?” Conte said. “Did we do something good or bad here?”
Strong ties
Pane bristled at the idea, suggested by some of the activists who favored taking down the statue, that he shouldn’t have a say because he, like many of the people who joined him, don’t live in Wooster Square, or New Haven.
“As an Italian American who was born in New Haven and as a child who grew up in the Annex,” Pane, who has lived for years now in East Haven, said he remains connected to the Wooster Street area as the traditional center for Italian community in Greater New Haven.
He acknowledged, however, that the neighborhood is a diverse one that continues to change.
Pane comes from a multi-generational family of Neapolitan entertainers.
His grandfather, Luigi Pane, brought Neapolitan theater to New Haven in the 1900s and his grandmother, Giuseppina Pastore Pane, was a Neapolitan singer who was famous well beyond New Haven and Connecticut. His aunt, Nina Pane Sanseverino, has continued her mother’s legacy, entertaining Italian Americans and others for many years in New Haven and beyond.