The Anti-Racist Origins of Columbus Day

Columbus's legacy is being rapidly re-evaluated. But it's worth remembering why we commemorated his legacy in the first place.

Photo by Kevin Olson on Unsplash

Christopher Columbus, the Italian explorer who set out across the ocean blue in 1492, looks like he’s on his way out.

More than half of the states in America including Washington, D.C. no longer celebrate Columbus Day. Many have replaced it with Indigenous Peoples' Day to honor the Native American population that was mostly wiped out by disease and conquest once Europeans came to the Americas.

The re-evaluation of Columbus’s legacy — re-casting him from brave explorer to cruel conqueror — was inevitable as America grew more tolerant and less shy about re-examining the less savory elements of our founding.

But not everybody is pleased with ending commemorations of Columbus. For years, organizations formed to give voice to Italian Americans pushed back on attempts to remove Columbus statues and designations, arguing that he played an important role in Italian American history.

Some Italian Americans, of course, disagree. No group is a monolith. There are all kinds of Italians we could commemorate instead, if we wanted to show America’s gratitude to the Italian diaspora. Why not have Martin Scorcese Day? The only violence you’ll find from him is in his films.

Photo by Frank van Hulst on Unsplash

But one reason Columbus Day may hold such special resonance among many Italian Americans is that it was specifically established to respect the community at a time when it was under brutal attack.

Columbus Day began not in the days and weeks after the founding of the country but in the late 19th century.

Although today we would all laugh at the insinuation that anti-Italian discrimination is a powerful prejudice in the United States, that was not the case in the 1800s. Italians were regularly stereotyped as violent, prone to criminal activity, and intellectually inferior. Italians were broadly scene as an entirely different stock of people as the Northern Europeans who founded the country.

At times, this prejudice escalated into violence. In 1890, David Hennessy, New Orleans’ Superintendent of Police, was shot. While he bled to death, witnesses asked him who was responsible. “Dagoes,” he reportedly replied, referencing an anti-Italian slur.

Hennesy’s murder spurred the city to imprison numerous Italian Americans. But when courts found them not guilty, many in the city were enraged. Spurred on by elite figures including newspaper columnists and city officials, a mob lynched 11 Italian Americans, including people who had been acquitted of any crime.

The Italian Sons and Daughters of America, a group that exists to represent Italian Americans, quotes from a New York Times article published just a couple days after the lynching to demonstrate the white-hot level of hatred towards Italians in the country:

These sneaking and cowardly Sicilians, the descendants of bandits and assassins, who have transported to this country the lawless passions, the cut-throat practices, and the oath-bound societies of their native country, are to us a pest without mitigations…These men of the Mafia killed Chief Hennessy in circumstances of peculiar atrocity…Lynch law was the only course open to the people of New Orleans to stay the issue of a new license to the Mafia to continue its bloody practices.

But overseas, the Italian government was horrified. To mollify both them and Italian Americans here at home, then-President Benjamin Harrison reached back into history and decided to elevate Columbus.

On July 21st, 1882, he issued a proclamation about the 400th anniversary of the discovery of the United States. In that proclamation, he wrote:

Now, therefore, I, Benjamin Harrison, President of the United States of America, in pursuance of the aforesaid joint resolution, do hereby appoint Friday, October 21, 1892, the four hundredth anniversary of the discovery of America by Columbus, as a general holiday for the people of the United States. On that day let the people, so far as possible, cease from toil and devote themselves to such exercises as may best express honor to the discoverer and their appreciation of the great achievements of the four completed centuries of American life.

Columbus stood in his age as the pioneer of progress and enlightenment. The system of universal education is in our age the most prominent and salutary feature of the spirit of enlightenment, and it is peculiarly appropriate that the schools be made by the people the center of the day's demonstration. Let the national flag float over every schoolhouse in the country and the exercises be such as shall impress upon our youth the patriotic duties of American citizenship.

That year, a million people gathered in New York City to commemorate the discovery of the country. The accompanying parade even included a contingent of a thousand Native Americans.

Decades later, in 1937, President Franklin Roosevelt elevated Columbus Day into an annual national holiday, responding in part to lobbying from the The Knights of Columbus, a Catholic organization.

Today, as we look back at Columbus Day, it might be useful to think about it as symbolizing something much bigger than one man.

When it comes to symbols, people tend to apply their own meanings to them. For some, Columbus was not only a great explorer but someone who symbolized the importance of the Italian people to the creation of the United States; to others, he is the man who began the long period of dispossession that marks Native history in the United States.

But while these two views clash, there’s no reason why we can’t find a way to respect each other and the broader meaning for both sides.

In Chicago, for instance, a group of Italian Americans and Native Americans came together to honor each other’s history:

"We're all Americans, we all have the right to believe in what we want to believe in, and we have to educate people on the importance of everybody's culture," said Frank Black Cloud, vice president of the Native American Guardian Association.

Frank Black Cloud and more than 20 others from his tribe in North Dakota traveled to Chicago this weekend to join arms with Italian Americans on Columbus Day. They gathered for a flag raising ceremony at Daley Plaza Friday, honoring the Italian culture and the history of Native Americans.

"It's very important today that some speak but everyone listen and that's what this whole weekend and especially on Monday is all about," said Ron Onesti, Joint Civic Committee of Italian Americans.

Whether you celebrate Columbus Day or Indigenous People’s Day or both, we could do worse than listen to Black Cloud and Onesti’s words.