A statue of Christopher Columbus now sits at the bottom of Baltimore’s Inner Harbor after a group of people toppled the statue on Independence Day.
Protesters used chains to rock the statue back and forth until it toppled on Saturday. They then rolled it from its post near Little Italy to the water’s edge and tipped it into the Inner Harbor.
Baltimore protesters pulled down a statue of Christopher Columbus and threw it into the Harbor on the 4th of July
— BallerAlert (@balleralert) July 5, 2020
Baltimore’s Columbus statue gets dumped in the harbor pic.twitter.com/ZwuNcqAH6d
— J. M. Giordano photo (@jmgpix) July 5, 2020
Lester Davis, a spokesman for Democratic Mayor Jack Young, told the Baltimore Sun that the protesters’ decision to topple the likeness of Columbus is part of a “re-examination taking place nationally and globally around some of these monuments and statues that may represent different things to different people.”
“We understand the dynamics that are playing out in Baltimore are part of a national narrative. We understand the frustrations,” Davis said. “What the city wants to do is serve as a national model, particularly with how we’ve done with protesting. We’ve seen people who have taken to the streets, we have supported them. We are going to continue to support it. That’s a full stop.”
Protesters had hung flyers throughout the city about plans to tear down all statues that honor “white supremacists, owners of enslaved people, perpetrators of genocide, and colonizers.” The toppling of Columbus’s statue was part of large protests against police brutality and racial injustice that have taken place nationwide following the death of George Floyd, a 46-year-old black man who died after an officer knelt on his neck for several minutes during an arrest in Minneapolis.
Davis could not confirm if officers were told to stand down and allow the statue to fall.
“Our officers in Baltimore City, who are some of the finest in country, they are principally concerned with the preservation of life,” Davis said. “That is sacrosanct. Everything else falls secondary to that, including statues.”
Several statues of Columbus have been removed or torn down since the protests began. Other historical figures have been targeted as well, including monuments to Confederate soldiers, and Presidents George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Ulysses Grant.
