Workers attempt to remove disfigured statue of Christopher Columbus
A statue of Christopher Columbus in Boston has been beheaded, police said on Wednesday.
A Columbus statue was also vandalized in downtown Miami, and another was dragged into a lake earlier in the week in Richmond, Virginia, according to local reports.
The incidents come as pressure is mounting in the United States to rid the country of the monuments associated with racism following massive protests over the murder of George Floyd by a white police officer in Minneapolis last month.
The Italian explorer Columbus, long hailed by textbooks as the so-called “New World” discoverer, is believed by many to have sparked years of genocide against Indigenous groups in the Americas.
He is regularly denounced in a similar way to the generals of the pro-slavery southern civil war.
The Boston statue – which stands on a pedestal in the heart of the city – has been controversial for years, like other Columbus statues in the United States, and has been vandalized in the past.
Boston police were alerted Tuesday after midnight, a spokesman for AFP said. An investigation is underway but no one has been arrested, he added.
A jogger running outside the statue on Wednesday said she approves of the beheading.
“Coming out of the Black Lives Matter protests, I think it’s a good thing to capitalize on this momentum,” she told AFP, without giving her name.
“Like the blacks in this country, the natives have also been harmed. I think this movement is quite powerful and it is very symbolic,” she added.
Over the years, dozens of American cities have replaced Columbus Day in October – which became a federal holiday in 1937 – with a day of tribute to Indigenous peoples.
But not Boston or New York, which have large communities of Italian origin.
Boston mayor Marty Walsh condemned the beheading, but added that the statue would be removed Wednesday pending a decision on its future, local media reported.
Protesters also desecrated a Columbus statue in Miami in a waterfront park with red paint and messages that said “Our streets”, “Black Lives Matter” and “George Floyd”, before the police does several arrests, according to the Miami Herald newspaper.
Protesters in Virginia used ropes to knock down the 2.44-meter (8-foot) statue and then threw it into a nearby lake on Tuesday, the Richmond Times-Dispatch said.
He echoed an incident in Bristol, England, on Sunday when protesters knocked over a statue of a slave trader and threw it into a port during anti-racism protests.
(With the exception of the title, this story was not edited by GalacticGaming staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
