LONDON, ENGLAND - OCTOBER 12: Red paint covers a statue of Christopher Columbus in Belgrave Square Gardens on October 12, 2021 in London, England. The defacing of the statue appears to coincide with the Columbus Day holiday, which many countries in the Americas celebrate on October 12. The holiday is observed on second Monday in October in the United States. (Photo by Rob Pinney/Getty Images) (Rob Pinney/Getty Images)

I’m sure many people have strong memories of the statues that were being tumbled or taken down in the summer of 2020. My first thought back then was that this would be the ideal time to become a sculptor. Think about it: Thanks to 3D printing, you could outdo all those marble-carvers and bronze-casters of yore — maybe even branch out to portrait busts and tombstones. But long ago I decided to become a historian, and after many years in that line of work, it was too late.

So instead, the historian part of me kicked in, as it usually does, and since I specialize in Italian history, I couldn’t help but wonder why, after the terrible police murder of George Floyd, Christopher Columbus happened to become the most frequent single target of resurgent American iconoclasm.

That racial prejudice persists as a legacy of slavery made it understandable that there were assaults on statues that celebrated the Confederacy. But the movement quickly enveloped the country’s many monuments to Christopher Columbus — a historical figure associated above all with Italian-Americans and, in recent decades, with the grievances of Native Americans. According to one tally, 35 Columbus statues were destroyed or removed in 2020, while Robert E. Lee, a more logical target, came in a distant second, losing only eight monuments.

I happen to have written about what Columbus actually did back in the late 15th and early 16th century, and also about the history of Columbus celebrations in America, so that summer I received many media inquiries, but also important were my discussions with friends. Most notably, one Black friend of mine expressed concern that the George Floyd “moment,” which for a few weeks had galvanized public opinion, was being hijacked by a Native American issue.

I think he had a point. Columbus statues make for great television visuals — especially when they’re beheaded, as in Boston, or if they’re protected by a circle of burly Italian-Americans carrying rifles, as in Philadelphia. One of the many ironies of that summer was that so many of the cities and towns that began debating in council meetings what to do with their Columbus statues and school holidays were places that had historic patterns of racial profiling in police stops.

From my vantage point in New Jersey, and also from discussions with reporters in other states who called about Columbus, I could see in real-time how in places like New Haven, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and Chicago, or in Waterbury, Conn., and in West Orange, N.J., cities where a serious review of policies governing policing and traffic stops would have been helpful, local politicians and activists instead engaged in distracting, protracted and poorly informed pillow fights about what Columbus did or did not do more than 500 years ago. George Floyd’s memory was poorly served.

But where do we stand now? Not that it will make everyone happy (hardly so), but I tend to think that President Biden pulled some of the sting from the Columbus issue when last year, for the first time, he announced by presidential proclamation that both Columbus Day and Indigenous Peoples Day should be celebrated on the same date. Although we treat it as a Monday holiday (and thus a “moveable feast”), in the long arc of history Oct. 12, 1492 (which that year fell on a Friday), the anniversary of Columbus landing on an island in the present-day Bahamas, remains, at least so far, the single most important known date in human history.

In the future, a more recent event could conceivably be imagined to carry more weight — the first nuclear bomb exploding, the lunar landing, the discovery of DNA or quantum computing — and we can of course hope that there are many more millennia of human history to come. There were, of course, other hugely important developments in the past — the taming of fire or the discovery of agriculture — but we have no fixed date for them. We do, however, know precisely when Columbus landed. And he, by connecting the Earth’s two great continental masses, along with their human populations and their animal and plant species, did more to change the history of the planet, for both good and ill, than anyone else.

Amid the charges and recriminations that have been traded about the U.S. holiday in recent decades, we should acknowledge that the controversy is actually a consequence of the date’s importance. That it was tragically consequential for indigenous peoples in the Americas should never be forgotten. But it also made possible an ongoing and still (knock on wood) largely successful experiment in self-government that could never first have happened in Europe. Nor should it be forgotten, if one goes back to 1892, that the date marked a willingness to embrace new classes of immigrants, the largest numbers of whom, at that point, were coming from Italy.

Connell holds the La Motta Chair in Italian Studies at Seton Hall University.

Copyright © 2022, New York Daily News

Copyright © 2022, New York Daily News