by James A. Bacon
Richmond’s statue of Christopher Columbus is heading to upstate New York. It’s a sad, sad tale.
At the height of the George Floyd “mostly peaceful” protests, leftist militants tore down the statue in Byrd Park, spray-painted it, set it on fire and threw it into nearby Fountain Lake. They claimed to be motivated by solidarity with America’s indigenous population.
Americans don’t honor Columbus for his mistreatment of native Americans; they honor him for his discovery of the Western Hemisphere. But militants do remember him for his abuse of the natives, which, apparently, is far more worthy of singling out for moral condemnation than native American societies that engaged in incessant warfare, enslavement and/or human sacrifice of one another.
Bearing the guilt of Western Civilization, Columbus also gets blamed for the demographic disaster that befell indigenous societies from disease… as if the Eastern and Western hemispheres would have never come into contact and native Americans would never have been exposed to diseases that had ravaged Europe, Asia and much of Africa for millennia. The Vikings had “discovered” North America centuries before, John Cabot discovered the Grand Banks fishery off Newfoundland for the English in 1498, and Vasco da Gama sailed around Africa the same year to reach India. Some even argue that ships from the Ming Dynasty’s Grand Fleet made it to the New World in the early 1400s.
Contact between the continents was inevitable, and so was the spread of disease. No one deserves blame, especially in a world that had no concept of germ theory, for this tragic development.
Many Americans are historical illiterates, however, so Columbus makes an easy scapegoat.
Italian-Americans still hold Columbus, who was Genoese in origin, in high esteem. The local Italian-American community was responsible for erecting the statue in the first place, overcoming opposition in the 1920s from officials who said Columbus was a foreigner and a Catholic and had no place in Richmond. Fast forward nearly a century: Richmond City Council made no move to restore the statue to its original place in Byrd Park, but it did vote to donate it to the Italian American Cultural Association of Virginia, which proceeded to refurbish it. No one in Richmond wanted to house the statue, so the Association found it a new home with the Sons of Italy in upstate New York.
The Richmond Times-Dispatch has the story here.
Columbus was not a saint. He was not a man of the 21st century. He engaged in many of the same brutal behaviors that were commonly practiced and rarely condemned in societies around the world. But his voyages to the New World altered the course of history. Richmond is the poorer for blotting out his memory.