As the anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ 1492 voyage to the Americas approached, a newspaper opined that, rather than being a hero, the navigator was “a pirate and adventurer,” the figure who inaugurated the era of “colonial politics” and was guilty of committing a “series of terrible massacres and usurpations against the native people and the Africans.”
This interpretation, while supported by a substantial body of historical scholarship, is sharply contested by leaders of some Italian-American organizations, who laud Columbus as a symbol of ethnic pride. As a consequence, across the United States, Italian-American organizations and conservative advocacy groups have fought legal battles against the removal of Columbus statues or the renaming of the holiday to Indigenous Peoples Day.
