Traditionalists are suing and lobbying local governments to resurrect memorials to Confederate generals, Founding Fathers and European explorers. Many of the statues disappeared from town squares and other public places during the pandemic-era protests against police violence and racism following George Floyd’s murder in 2020.
Ohio’s capital, named for Christopher Columbus , took down a 22-foot-high, 3-ton statue of its namesake from City Hall that year. Officials declared the 1955 gift from sister city Genoa, Italy, had come to represent “patriarchy, oppression and divisiveness.”
“We will no longer live in the shadow of our ugly past,” Mayor Andrew Ginther, a Democrat, said at the time. Columbus’s detractors tie the Italian explorer to the brutal subjugation of native civilizations in the Americas. His supporters say Columbus should be lauded for his discoveries, not blamed for what followed.
The city’s Columbus statue for now lies on its back inside a fenced storage facility, monitored by security cameras and adorned from head to toe with a strand of yellow caution tape. In April, a coalition of Italian-American groups filed a federal lawsuit claiming the statue’s removal was illegal and demanding its return.
“The silent majority is becoming vocal,” said Jack Conte, 67 years old, the lawsuit’s organizer. “You reach a point where this stuff is shoved down your throat, and you can only take so much of it.”
The Trump administration is helping lead the charge ahead of the nation’s 250th anniversary next month. In March, the administration erected a Columbus statue near the White House, a replica of one that protesters sank in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor in 2020.
The replica was donated by the Conference of Presidents of Major Italian-American Organizations. The group’s president, Basil Russo —a former Democratic politician from Cleveland—said Columbus had become a scapegoat for Western colonization. In a thank-you letter to Russo, Trump lauded Columbus as “the original American hero and one of the most gallant and visionary men to ever walk the face of the Earth.”
Russo himself can’t believe Columbus took down its statue. “It’s the name of their city,” he said. “What sense does that make?”
The Interior Department recently installed a statue of Caesar Rodney , a Delaware signer of the Declaration of Independence and a slave owner, in Washington’s Freedom Plaza. The monument had been removed from its spot in Wilmington, Del., in 2020, and put into storage.
“You either celebrate the 250th and the historic people and events and enter into the drama of the heroic choices made by the revolutionary generation,” said Vince Haley , an adviser to the president on anniversary initiatives, “or leave it to those who would readily distort our history and use it as a political instrument.”
Nicole Moore said certain statues shouldn’t return to public spaces. She is president of the National Council on Public History, which represents historians and museum administrators. “Humans are complicated. But what’s not complicated is racism. What’s not complicated is genocide,” she said. “When we know the history, we have to ask ourselves, do we want to celebrate this person?”
‘Take that thing down’
In December, a stone highway marker honoring Robert E. Lee , the Confederate general, suddenly appeared in Marion Square, planted alongside a major thoroughfare in a hub of picnics, farmers markets and celebrations in Charleston, S.C.
At a subsequent meeting of the city’s Commission on History, Dale Theiling , one of the commissioners, explained that Charleston had agreed to release the monument to the United Daughters of the Confederacy. The group dropped a lawsuit against the city that it had filed after the statue was pulled from a public school in 2021 and put in storage.
Lee’s return to public view was aided by locale. Marion Square is owned by a private organization, the Board of Field Officers of the Fourth Brigade of the South Carolina Militia, which got the land from the city in 1833. The Fourth Brigade granted a request to erect the monument in Marion Square, said Theiling, who also serves as the group’s chairman.
Wilmot Fraser , the sole Black member of the city history commission, called the monument a monstrosity. He turned to speak directly to Theiling during the meeting in the city’s council chambers, adorned with a full-length portrait of George Washington .
“I’m hoping that you would, especially since you’re a decent man, Dale, that you would prevail upon whoever is conspiring to resurrect the Confederacy to remove this thing,” the 86-year-old Fraser said. “Take that thing down and let it stay down.”
“I don’t know the people that are trying to resurrect the Confederacy,” Theiling replied.
“Obviously someone is,” Fraser said, “because someone resurrected that monument.”
“No, sir, that’s not the goal,” Theiling said. The Fourth Brigade, he said, “is here to protect South Carolina’s, particularly Charleston’s, military history, and that’s what this is.”
Fraser suggested a Confederate graveyard was a more appropriate home. The city’s legal counsel later advised that Charleston no longer had a say in the matter because the monument now sat on private property.
In March, the Texas Rangers baseball team announced on social media the return to public view of a “One Riot, One Ranger” statue at the ballpark. The 12-foot bronze sculpture of a Texas Ranger had been removed from Dallas Love Field airport in 2020 after claims that the officer who served as the model for the statue—a tribute to the law enforcement agency—sided with opponents to desegregation of a public high school in 1956.
“The Texas Rangers have long occupied a revered place in Texas history dating to the creation of the organization over 200 years ago,” the ball club said when the statue was announced.
Hundreds of comments followed the online announcement.
“Hell yeah need to bust all our history out that’s been stowed away,” one said.
“Racist, bigoted, backward move by the Texas Rangers,” another said.
Rep. Marc Veasey (D., Texas) wrote to the team, “Celebrating the legacy of someone connected to blocking integration is not preserving history. It is glorifying injustice.”
In Louisiana, state lawmakers passed a bill to allow the state to take custody of statues removed by local governments and relocate them to state parks. Officials in New Orleans, which had removed several Confederate statues, resisted.
“These statues are city property,” Mayor Helena Moreno, a Democrat, said in May. “You can’t, just by some kind of legislation, take them away.”
Last straw
Columbus, Ohio’s fastest-growing big city, was named in the 1800s by a local politician who admired the explorer.
The city’s emblem and its flag display the Santa Maria, Columbus’s flagship, which led the way in the trans-Atlantic voyage of 1492. The Columbus Day parade became a civic institution. A wooden replica of the Santa Maria was docked on the Scioto River near City Hall for decades. The Italian Village neighborhood named a park for Columbus. Columbus State Community College had his statue on its campus. At City Hall, the statue of Columbus stood atop a stone pedestal.
Over the years, as some historians soured on Columbus’s treatment of Native Americans and the impact of colonization that followed his discovery, the city began removing his many tributes. In 2014, Columbus dismantled the Santa Maria. Its rotting parts lie in the grass near a city sewage treatment plant.
The city renamed Columbus Day to Indigenous Peoples’ Day in 2018. Columbus Park is now called Warren Square Park for its location on Warren Street.
Columbus State removed its Columbus statue in June 2020, and the Columbus statue at City Hall came down shortly after.
Yet the seafarer wasn’t entirely forgotten. The city initiated what turned into two years of community meetings under the banner “Reimagining Columbus.” The goals were to find a new home for the statue and provide an expanded historical context for visitors.
“When I was a kid, Christopher Columbus was a hero,” said Conte, who found the municipal exercise exasperating. At one meeting, he said, a facilitator handed out crayons and asked participants to draw in their favorite colors.
“All these Kumbaya things,” said Conte, who heads companies in water pipeline rehabilitation and fiber-optic construction. “After the fifth or sixth one, I went up to the lady, and I said, ‘I thought we were here to talk about the statue?’”
The meetings yielded the idea of a new park with a section for the statue and interpretive signs. But there was no funding allocated or location set aside. For Conte, that was the last straw.
Conte organized the Friends of Christopher Columbus Foundation, enlisting local Italian-American groups. “They’re not listening to anything we’re saying or asking,” Conte said.
Jaime Sisto, an international trade and economic development attorney who backs Conte, said moves to erase Columbus from the city of Columbus piled one on top of the other, “between the renaming of Columbus Day, the Santa Maria, the park, all these things.”
Shelly Corbin, a Native American activist who participated in the “Reimagining” meetings, found the federal suit disheartening. “Everyone’s trying to hang on to what’s comfortable, and I get it because we live in very turbulent, uncomfortable times,” she said. “But history isn’t one-sided and people get to speak their stories.”
Isaiah Bohanon, 22, who works in marketing, sees the Columbus statue as representing a “historic moment for the Western World.”
“Who is Salmon Chase?” he said, invoking the 19th-century chief justice of the Supreme Court, an Ohioan with a statue at the state capitol. “I’d never heard of him, and he has a statue. But I’ve heard of Christopher Columbus. I think he deserves a statue.”
