Five years after it was splattered with red paint, toppled and dragged into a lake, the bronze statue of Christopher Columbus that stood for nearly a century in a city park in Richmond, Va., has been fished out, restored and given a new home. It now gazes out at a bocce ball court outside a Sons of Italy lodge some 300 miles away in Blauvelt, N.Y.
Boston’s marble Columbus statue was beheaded in 2020 — its second decapitation. Repaired and given to the Knights of Columbus, it was moved to the garden of a nearby church, where it now stands among religious statues.
And in Baltimore, where protesters pulled down a Columbus statue in 2020 and dumped it into the Inner Harbor, the broken pieces have been retrieved and used to guide the creation of a replica.
The culture war over Columbus statues has entered a new phase.
“Pretty much every October we’re going to have a different view of Columbus and therefore of the Columbus statues,” said the historian Matthew Restall, who wrote “The Nine Lives of Christopher Columbus,” a new biography chronicling his contentious legacy. “These are essentially living objects whose meaning is constantly shifting, and so where they are located and how we talk about them has to also be constantly changing. And that’s not a bad thing.”
Monuments celebrating the Genoese explorer and his voyages were put up across the United States in the 19th and 20th centuries by Italian American groups who saw him a symbol of ethnic pride at a time when immigrants from Italy faced persecution and discrimination. In recent decades some of those statues were vandalized by protesters outraged by Columbus’s role ushering in an era of mass colonization and oppression of Indigenous people.
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The post Beheaded and Sent to Watery Graves, Columbus Statues Get New Life appeared first on New York Times.
