America has had a racial reckoning. So what is the legacy of Christopher Columbus now?

  • Oops!
    Something went wrong.
    Please try again later.

In the heart of downtown Chicago, on the edge of Grant Park, are the remnants of what used to be a Christopher Columbus statue. The pedestal that once carried the 33-foot statue is wrapped in plastic. A chain-linked fence surrounds the perimeter with a sign that serves as a warning to any potential protesters: “No Trespassing.”

Last year, that statue, like many others, was removed amid a public reckoning where protesters became more conscious about the monuments erected across the country. From Miami to New Mexico, tributes to the 15th-century explorer and colonizer met unceremonious ends.

In St. Paul, protesters tied a rope around the 10-foot bronze Columbus statue that stood in front of the state Capitol and yanked it off its stone pedestal. Someone beheaded the Christopher Columbus statue in Boston. Protesters in Baltimore toppled a marble Columbus statue and rolled the broken stone into a nearby harbor. Ohio’s capital city, named after Christopher Columbus, removed its statue near City Hall and placed it in storage.

“For many people in our community, the statue represents patriarchy, oppression and divisiveness,” Columbus Mayor Andrew Ginther said after removing the statue last year. “That does not represent our great city, and we will no longer live in the shadow of our ugly past,” he said.

The Christopher Columbus statue is shown in Italy being readied for a trip aboard the Italian liner Cristoforo Colombo for shipment to the United States in 1955.
The Christopher Columbus statue is shown in Italy being readied for a trip aboard the Italian liner Cristoforo Colombo for shipment to the United States in 1955.

Although many of Columbus's statues have been toppled over, remnants of his presence remain in the names of U.S. cities and streets. But experts say last year's reckoning has shined a spotlight on the cruelties of Columbus's career, giving people a more comprehensive understanding of who he was.

More: What is Indigenous Peoples' Day? Does it replace Columbus Day? Everything you need to know

More: Christopher Columbus statue in Mexico City to be replaced with one honoring Indigenous woman

Hayley Negrin, an assistant professor of history specializing in Native American history at the University of Illinois-Chicago, said Columbus should be known for setting up the system of enslaving indigenous people in the Americas.

"If we're giving him credit for discovering America, we also have to give him credit for discovering Indian slavery," she said.

FILE - In this Monday, Oct. 10, 2011 file photo, Ferntree, of Duncan, British Columbia, a member of the Cowichan Tribes, holds her hand up as a prayer is given during a Native American protest against Columbus Day in Seattle. Protest organizers say that Columbus could not have "discovered" a western hemisphere already inhabited by about 100 million people. (AP Photo/Elaine Thompson)

Columbus documented his desire to enslave the indigenous people in the Bahamas the first day he met them.

"They should be good servants. ... I, our Lord being pleased, will take hence, at the time of my departure, six natives for your Highnesses," Columbus wrote in his journal on Oct. 12, 1492. Two days later, Columbus noted, "with fifty men, they can all be subjugated and made to do what is required of them."

One part of Columbus's past that people need to understand is his cruelty, Negrin said. Columbus served as the governor of Hispaniola in what is now Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

According to a document Spanish historians discovered 15 years ago, Columbus once cut off a man's ear and nose for stealing corn. The allegations of brutality against Columbus were so numerous and extreme that the Queen of Spain had Columbus jailed and removed him as governor, Negrin said.

A statue of Christopher Columbus in Wilcox Park in Westerly.
A statue of Christopher Columbus in Wilcox Park in Westerly.

During Columbus's second voyage across the Atlantic in 1493, he gave one of his shipmates an indigenous woman to rape.

Michele de Cuneo, a shipmate of Columbus, documented this barbaric account in a letter penned on Oct. 28, 1495. He described the scenario after Columbus and his men attacked, captured and killed a small group of "Caribs."

"When I was in the boat, I took a beautiful Cannibal girl, and the admiral (Columbus) gave her to me," de Cuneo wrote in his letter. "Having her in my room and she being naked as is their custom, I began to want to amuse myself with her. Since I wanted to have my way with her and she was not willing, she worked me over so badly with her nails that I wished I had never begun. To get to the end of the story, seeing how things were going, I got a rope and tied her up so tightly that she made unheard-of cries which you wouldn't have believed."

"We can talk legacy, but the violence against women is a really important part of his history and we cannot forget that," Negrin said.

Columbus does deserve credit for recognizing Atlantic wind patterns and navigating his ships based on an educated guess, said William Keegan, anthropology professor and curator of Latin American Studies at the University of Florida.

"That was no small feat to recognize that such a voyage could be made," he said. But those accomplishments do not warrant Columbus being celebrated and memorialized, he said.

"We have to be careful about our symbols," Keegan said. "Columbus represents all that was bad in the European colonization of the Americas. The things that he set in motion and the European attitudes of the day were directly responsible for probably millions of Native Americans in South America, North America dying."

Last year heightened people's awareness of Columbus, but Keegan said he believes people's interest in Columbus will wane as time passes.

"For most people, I think he's an afterthought now. "Moving forward, Columbus will be largely forgotten."

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Legacy of Christopher Columbus will be one of violence, historians say