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Midstate communities reconsider Columbus likenesses in public space

“Statues and monuments like this are about who we choose to glorify.”

  • Alanna Elder/WITF
A statue of Christopher Columbus is seen behind barricades at Marconi Plaza, Monday, June 15, 2020, in the South Philadelphia neighborhood of Philadelphia.

 Matt Slocum / AP Photo

A statue of Christopher Columbus is seen behind barricades at Marconi Plaza, Monday, June 15, 2020, in the South Philadelphia neighborhood of Philadelphia.

(Harrisburg) — Three Central Pennsylvania cities have joined other communities across the country in reexamining their Columbus statues amid a burst of organizing against racism across the country.

Lancaster County Commissioner Craig Lehman has called for the removal of a bust of the explorer that sits outside the county courthouse.  As of Wednesday, he did not have the support of the county’s other two commissioners.

City Council unanimously passed a resolution asking the county to move the statue from public property at their meeting yesterday.

Council President Ismail Smith-Wade-El said in an interview, understanding history means recognizing Columbus’ actions in the Americas. Archival sources show he took indigenous Caribbean people back to Europe to sell them into slavery, becoming the first transatlantic human trafficker”; other explorers followed his example.

“In the modern era, we don’t build statues to human traffickers. Statues and monuments like this are about who we choose to glorify,” he said. “They’re about offering us an example for how we might better live our lives as a community and to recognize the contributions of people whose lives reify the values that are important to us.”

An Italian immigrant named Antonio Palumbo is credited with the bust’s installation in 1992, decades after he first began appealing to city leaders to erect a Columbus statue.  A Sunday News article from 2014 said the figure of Columbus was also “designed in the likeness of Mr. Palumbo”, who died in 1994.

Columbus is a symbol of pride for some Italian Americans, whose communities have a history of discrimination in the United States. Smith-Wade-El said, he sympathizes with that defense.

“There have been just so many contributing Italian Americans in the history of the Americas that to act as though this is the only option by which that community can represent their pride and contributions to the United States I think is fallacious and honestly, does a disservice to their entire community,” he said.

Smith-Wade-El said the statue was controversial from the beginning. After community members lobbied to remove it in 2017, the city declared the beginning of October Indigenous People’s Week.

Someone doused the bust in red spray paint a week-and-a-half ago.

In Reading, a much larger statue of Columbus stands at City Park, holding a stack of charts in one hand and pointing with the other. Kiara Delgado, 26, said she has been going to the park since she was a teenager, but never really noticed the statue of Columbus.

That is, until a recent Black Lives Matter protest.

“That’s when I was like, it’s kinda ironic how we’re all sitting here talking and gathering together to protest racism while we’re standing next to this statue that represents racism,” she said.

Delgado was born in Puerto Rico, where Columbus landed on his second voyage in 1493.

The Taíno people were living there and on other islands across the Caribbean. Historians debate the extent of their population and the mass death that followed, but agree that within decades, Taíno ways of life were destroyed and their population devastated. Pieces of Taíno language, culture, and ancestry persist, but for Delgado, it is impossible to know the whole story of the place she came from.

“We don’t know our history because of this,” Delgado said.

Delgado has started a petition for the statue’s removal. As of Thursday morning, it had 189 signatures.

Another petition is circulating in Hazleton, where some residents want to rename Columbus Court playground and remove its statue.

 

WITF’s Alanna Elder is part of the “Report for America” program — a national service effort that places journalists in newsrooms across the country to report on under-covered topics and communities.

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